


Complicated

by awomannotagirl



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alien Biology, Canon What Canon, F/F, Kara is NOT HUMAN folks, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Polyamory, Pseudo-Incest, Threesome - F/F/F, because why not, but porn with extensive buildup and negotiation, dropping a little Supercorp in at the end, it's not incest if one of them is an alien, more accurately Threesome - F/F/A, people are born, people die, plot and feelings have snuck in here somehow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-16
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2018-10-06 01:19:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 50,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10322252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awomannotagirl/pseuds/awomannotagirl
Summary: Alex has spent half her life guarding, protecting, and keeping secrets for her sister—her beautiful, desirable, untouchable foster sister who arrived in her life just in time to make a mess of her adolescent sexuality.Now Alex is an adult, finally untangling her sexual identity, finally having a healthy relationship with a woman she really wants to be with. Her responsibility for Kara, however, doesn’t weigh any less heavily. She is going to have to reconcile history with future, and quick, to keep her life on track.And then it starts getting complicated.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This piece is born from the examination of two incomprehensible aspects of the _Supergirl_ canon: we are supposed to believe first, that a teenage nascent lesbian is presented with an inhumanly attractive teenage sibling but never has a sexual thought about her, and second, that alien Kara’s alien body is exactly like a human’s, only stronger. 
> 
> Let’s assume that neither of these extremely unlikely things is true.
> 
> I honestly have no idea where this is going to end up.

_are you free tonight? im feeling a lot of pressure_

Alex stared at the text. She felt her mouth go dry and her heart start to thud. As she often did, she wished fervently that she had better control over her autonomous nervous system; she might be able to beat a lie-detector test, but the person who’d sent this text could hear her heartbeat and must think that Alex was feeling—

What was Alex feeling? She hadn’t expected this, hadn’t had a request like this in so long. She’d thought, if she’d thought about it at all, which she very carefully hadn’t, that they were done with this. 

As if in direct response to Alex’s consternation, another text pinged in: _sorry shouldn’t have sent that. forget it ok?_

Which of course Alex couldn’t. She’d made a promise to a lonely, vulnerable girl who was now, appearances of superhumanity aside, a lonely, vulnerable woman. She would never forget that.

She stood up and walked down the hall, briskly, determinedly. She opened the door to the conference room where Kara sat, looking off into nothing, looking drained and, as much as she ever could, cheerless. 

Alex moved quickly behind her and took her by the shoulders. She dug her fingers into the muscles with a grip that would have been agonizing for anyone else but was, she knew, a pleasant caress to Kara. She leaned in and said, low into Kara’s ear, “Don’t be sorry about needing me. Pressure is pressure, right?” With a final jab of her thumbs into the thick cords of Kara’s neck, she said, “Come by about nine, okay?” She could feel Kara’s surprise thrum through her body under her hands, but she also saw her nod.

 

 

At seven the doorbell rang. Alex felt herself smile. Maggie had a key, of course, and she would let herself in, but she always rang. She was so careful about Alex’s privacy.

“Hey, babe,” Maggie said from the doorway, the rustle and clink of bottles in a bag telling Alex that she’d brought provisions—beer, presumably—even though Alex, sitting cross-legged on the bed, couldn’t see her yet.

Maggie walked into view and put the bag down on the counter with a tinkling thump, muffled by the fabric of the reusable shopping bag Kara had bought for her and insisted she use. She turned to face Alex on the bed, and the relieved expression of her face and body told Alex that she hadn’t been expecting the grin of welcome.

She crossed the room and scooted onto the bed next to Alex; they held each other for a long happy moment, until Maggie sighed into Alex’s hair and pulled back to look at her.

“ ‘Can you come by at seven? I need to talk to you’ is pretty scary, hon,” she said, humor salving the real worry in her voice. “What’s up?”

Alex sighed, her smile fading. She knew she had to have this conversation, but she absolutely didn’t want to. “I have to talk to you about something with Kara.”

Maggie cocked her head, obviously surprised and then, immediately, concerned. “Is she all right?”

Alex felt a rush of intense affection and gratitude. If there was one thing that could make Alex love Maggie more than her basic Maggie-ness, it was the way she had embraced Kara and adopted Alex’s own protective care for her. “I think so. More or less. She’s pretty stressed out ...”

Maggie snorted. “That’s an understatement. I saw her at a crime scene yesterday and she looked as if she was going to snap in half. With a big smile on her face, of course.”

“Of course,” Alex laughed. She sobered quickly, the fact of what she was about to tell Maggie hanging heavy. “Kara sent me a text today. She asked me to do something for her, something I haven’t done in a long time, not in so many words but there’s a way she used to ask, and I ...” She stopped herself, knowing she was babbling and not communicating any useful information. She sighed. “I think I should go back and start at the beginning.”

“A very good place to start,” Maggie said, eyebrows raised. Kara had made them watch _The Sound of Music_ the previous weekend.

Alex took a deep breath and tried to find the right place to pick up the thread. There were so many threads. “I’ve told you what it was like for Kara when she first got here. How overwhelmed she was, and how lost, and alone ...”

Maggie was nodding. “I’ve tried to imagine what it would be like. Nothing familiar. No one I know anywhere. Having to speak a new language. All the cultural rules different so I’m always doing something wrong. And all while I’m still grieving.”

Alex couldn’t help it. She leaned forward and kissed Maggie.

“What was that for?” Maggie asked.

“Not many people—well, _no one_ that I can remember has ever been that empathetic toward Kara. The way you said that, really putting yourself in her place—it’s uncomfortable, when you get that deep. People hardly ever try.”

“People are jerks,” Maggie said. “And I spent a lot of my life feeling like I was from outer space. At least I was used to the totally alien place I had to live.” She shrugged. “Anyway, go on. This is about Kara.”

“Right,” Alex said. “So—she was so lonely, and sad, and weird—” She shook her head. “There was so little I could do, really, even after I stopped being an asshole to her.

“One day I got home from school and she was sitting on the couch, just frozen. Really, like catatonic. And stiff, so tense. I wasn’t sure what to do. I tried hugging her, and she didn’t respond at all.

“Then I thought, She can’t even feel that. So I grabbed her arms and I just—” She mimed squeezing hard. “It got through. She kind of woke up and looked at me. So I kept doing it, as hard as I could.” She sighed. “I still don’t know what happened to her that day. It might not have been anything in particular, just all the shit built up.”

Now Alex looked away from Maggie, out into the apartment. “And then she said to me, ‘No one ever touches me in a way I can feel.’ It made me so sad, and so guilty. And so, it got to be a thing with us. When she was upset, I’d touch her like that, _hard._ It would have bruised the hell out of you or me.

“As time went on, we experimented. Can you feel this, can you feel that. What felt good and what didn’t. What I _could_ do, physically. I’d basically give her a back massage wearing brass knuckles.” Maggie chuckled and Alex smiled at her. “You think I’m joking, but I’m not.” Her smile faded. “She could feel that. She could feel me bite her. She could feel me pressing down on a single place with all my weight. And finally we figured out that she could feel me best ... inside her.” The last two words were almost whispered, and Alex felt her cheeks heat up. She’d never discussed this out loud, not even with Kara. She flicked a glance at Maggie, whose face was still, a tiny crease between her eyes. _Oh god, she doesn’t understand, how could she understand?_ Alex went on, feeling a little desperate, talking faster. “We never thought of it as sex, at least neither of us ever called it that. And it didn’t feel like that. Not really. Not exactly.”

“Did you make her come?” 

Alex paused, unprepared for the question. “Um. I’m not—Well, yes. I guess I do. Did.”

“What did she do for you?” Maggie’s voice was calm, quiet, and she appeared not to notice Alex’s hasty verb tense correction.

Alex took a deep breath. “At first nothing. But later she wanted to—She’d touch me, too. I’d be laying into her as hard as I could, and she’d touch me as softly as she could.” She shut her eyes, trying not to feel the gentle strokes of Kara’s fingertips on her back, down her sides, over her ass.

“Did she make you come?”

“Yes,” Alex whispered. She risked another glance at Maggie; the crease between her eyebrows had deepened with thought or puzzlement.

“When we started dating,” Maggie said slowly, “you told me you’d never had sex with a woman before.”

Alex nodded dumbly.

“So you didn’t think of what you did with Kara as sex?”

“I didn’t,” Alex said. There was more to it than that, of course, but she wasn’t capable of explaining the more complicated parts, not yet. Her voice was rough with the tears that kept wanting to burst out. “It sounds crazy even to me, now that I’m saying it out loud like this, but I really didn’t.”

Maggie was quiet for a moment. Finally she said, “It doesn’t sound crazy. It sounds like you were giving Kara what she needed and keeping yourself from freaking out in a really tough situation.”

Alex almost collapsed from relief. Whatever Maggie felt about all this, it didn’t sound like she thought Alex had lied to her, and it didn’t seem like she was judging her. “Thank you,” she said.

“For what?” Maggie looked genuinely puzzled. 

“For ... not walking out. For not telling me I’m a lying bitch. For not looking at me like I’m a case study for the DSM.”

“All of which,” Maggie said, half smiling, “you are probably telling yourself.” The smile faded quickly. “Sex makes people do and think really fucked-up things. Especially when it’s sex you aren’t supposed to have, or even want. I know more than I want to know about that.” She touched Alex on the cheek, looking her directly in the eyes. “There’s no gay person on this earth who hasn’t hidden something huge from themselves. The real question is, what are you going to do now?”

Alex felt a little sick. “Right. That. I’m not sure.”

Maggie said, “Kara texted you today? And you think she wants a sex-not-sex workover?”

Alex nodded, feeling that heavy twist in her gut again. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, low. “I promised her I’d always be there for her, however she needed me. But—” She gestured helplessly toward Maggie. “I can’t. I can’t pretend I don’t know what it means anymore, and I won’t cheat on you.”

Maggie inhaled and exhaled deliberately. “We haven’t actually agreed to be exclusive,” she said, picking her words carefully.

But Alex snorted derisively. “This isn’t me fooling around with someone I met in a bar,” she said. “This is the _other_ most important person in my life. This is Kara. And she’s asking for something from me that I’ve promised to you.”

“Have you?” Maggie asked, without thinking. At Alex’s expression, she went on, “Babe, I know what’s between us is serious. But I’d say exactly the opposite of what you just said: If you met somebody in a bar and took them home, I’d be pissed as hell. You’d be treating _us_ like something that didn’t matter. But this is Kara. I’d never get in the way of what you guys have.” She added softly, “Not as long as there was still room for me.”

Alex stared at her, and then lunged over and grabbed her in a tight, wordless hug. They held each other, rocking, and Maggie threaded her hand into Alex’s hair. After a few moments, Alex said into Maggie’s neck, “I don’t deserve you.”

“Probably not,” Maggie laughed. “I don’t deserve you either, so let’s not worry about it.” She tightened her hold on the back of Alex’s head and said indistinctly, “I thought you were gonna kick me to the curb, honestly.”

Alex shook her head violently, as well as she could in the confines of Maggie’s arms. Then a thought struck her. “I don’t know how Kara’s going to feel, or what she really expects,” she said, pulling back a little. “After she sent me the first text, she sent me another one saying ‘Forget it, I shouldn’t have sent that.’ ”

Maggie frowned. “So she’s facing up to it too, I’d guess.”

“I guess.” Alex chewed her bottom lip. 

“How long has it been since you—?” Maggie delicately didn’t finish the question.

“A long time. Not at all since Kara moved here, to National City. And we hadn’t really, very often, after high school. It got—complicated.” Alex closed her eyes, drained by the prospect of explaining all the ways it was complicated.

“But you didn’t talk about it,” Maggie said.

Alex shook her head, a rueful smile on her lips. 

“Oh, Danvers.” Maggie rolled her eyes. “Oh, Danverses, I should say.” She gave Alex a piercing look. “You know you’ve gotta talk about it now, right?”

“I know,” Alex sighed. “I know.”


	2. Chapter 2

They ate some pasta with fresh pesto and cherry tomatoes and Alex watched the clock advance toward nine. Maggie had asked if she should leave before Kara arrived, and Alex, though she wasn’t really sure, had said no. Maggie’s presence would ensure that Kara would know something had shifted, and Alex needed to be left with no possibility of chickening out on the talk they had to have.

In an unspoken compact for mutual comfort, they lay down on the couch, Alex stretched next to Maggie, head on her shoulder and one hand flat on her chest, feeling the beating of her heart. She still felt apprehensive and tense, but she knew that at least half of her world wasn’t going to fall apart tonight.

Then she heard footsteps in the hall, stopping outside her door. Maggie heard them too, and turned her head. They waited, but the key didn’t enter the lock, the door didn’t open.

“She knows we’re both here,” Alex said to Maggie, leaving unspoken the rest of the sentence: _“and it’s wigging her out.”_ She raised her head and said at conversational volume, “Come in, Kara. Please.”

At that, the key went in and turned and the door swung open. Kara came in diffidently and stood facing them where they lay. “Hey,” she said, falsely bright.

“Hey,” Alex said. “Come sit here with us.” She and Maggie wiggled up until they were mostly sitting rather than lying and there was room for Kara on the end of the sofa. She sat upright and far away.

“I assume you’ve talked,” she said at last.

Alex nodded. “Yes.”

“So you know about—” Kara said to Maggie, waving her hand between herself and Alex.

“Yeah, I do,” Maggie answered, wishing she could fast-forward through the awkwardness of this conversation. “But, uh, do _you_ know?” Kara looked confused. “Alex said that you guys have never really talked about it. About you being, whatever, physical.”

Kara finally smiled a little. “We had sex, Maggie. Kind of a lot of sex.”

Maggie felt Alex, next to her, draw in a breath at Kara’s unexpectedly bald statement.

“And yes,” Kara now looked directly at Alex, “we never actually talked about it. I don’t know why, exactly? Except that we didn’t, and then we got used to not talking about it, and then it seemed weird to talk about it ...” She trailed off. 

“I didn’t want to be gay,” Alex said, “and you didn’t even know what being gay was. And we were supposed to be sisters.” 

“We _are_ sisters,” Kara said truculently.

Alex tensed, and felt Maggie squeeze the back of her neck gently. “I’ve tried to explain the whole incest taboo thing to her,” she said to Maggie. “It just makes her mad.”

“It’s stupid,” Kara said.

“Well,” Maggie said carefully, “with you two, I’d agree, it is. But there are some reasonable reasons for it in human society. Genetics, for example. Although with lesbians ...”

“We weren’t exactly having lesbian sex,” Kara said. “I mean, some of it could be described that way. But I’m kind of by definition not a lesbian.” 

Maggie looked at her as if she had just spoken in Kryptonese.

Alex winced. _Trust Kara to dive right into the part I couldn’t figure out how to tell Maggie,_ she thought. Aloud, she said to Maggie, “Kara’s not human, babe.” When Maggie still looked uncomprehending, Alex sighed and clarified: “She doesn’t have the same anatomy that you and I do. It’s similar, but not the same.”

Kara said, “I’ll just show her.” When both Alex and Maggie looked horrified, she said, “What?” 

“You don’t have to expose yourself to me,” Maggie managed to get out.

Kara shook her head in amusement. “I’ll never get used to how prudish humans are.” She stood up and stripped off her jeans and underwear quickly, nonchalantly, and turned to Maggie. “See?” she said, gesturing. 

Maggie stared; she couldn’t help herself. As Alex had said, Kara was similar to them in physiology, at least as far as Maggie could see, but far from identical. She had the same swell of pubic mound—hairless, but that wasn’t unusual in itself. Instead of a cleft created by the swells of labia between her legs, however, Kara had a slit like a tightly closed mouth. 

“It’s kind of like the ventral urogenital slit of a dolphin,” Kara said conversationally. 

“Oh,” Maggie said faintly.

“Inside,” Kara said, still talking as if she were discussing her arm muscles, “I have a vagina, more or less like yours, and also a structure ... It’s kind of like a penis, but the closest analogue is really an ovipositor.”

“Ovipositor? I don’t know what that is,” Maggie said. High school biology had been a long time ago.

Alex took over. “Many insects, and some kinds of fish, have a sort of long tubular thing that they use to lay eggs,” she explained. “Kara’s gametes aren’t either eggs or sperm, technically, but they’re structurally more like eggs.”

“I don’t have a separate clitoral body like you do,” Kara went on. “All the tissue inside the slit is pretty sensitive, including the ovi. And the vaginal opening is—wow.” She sang the last word and did a little jazz hands. 

“Uh huh,” Maggie said, trying to look only at Kara’s face.

“Here, let me show you,” Kara said, widening her stance and pulling the slit open with her fingers. 

“Kara! God! You really don’t have to do that,” Maggie exclaimed.

Kara giggled. “It’s just not a big deal to me, Maggie,” she said. “I have to pretend to be modest, I wasn’t raised with the whole private parts hangup that you all have. Go on and look.” 

Maggie couldn’t help herself. She looked. Kara’s cunt was as beautiful as she’d always thought every woman’s was, plump and pink and glistening. Different, yes. What would have been the nub of a clit was significantly larger, her vaginal opening more symmetrical, with small, delicate ridges surrounding it rather than inner labia.

“I’ll extend my ovi for you,” Kara said, and got a faraway look on her face; the not-quite-a-clit nub thickened and slid out like a huge, stiff tongue. 

“Jesus,” Maggie squeaked, startled. Kara laughed and retracted it.

Maggie turned to Alex. “Did you ever, um ... ?”

Alex sighed. “Yes.”

“Is it like a guy’s ...”

“Sort of. More mobile.”

Maggie shook her head quickly. _Things I don’t need to know,_ she thought. “You didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant, at least,” she said flippantly. The instantly stony faces of both Danvers women told her that she’d misspoken in a big way. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.” To Alex she said, “So you ... could.”

“Yeah,” Alex said, her eyes sliding away. “It never occurred to us that it could happen, two different species and everything. But—” She made a helpless gesture. After a long, strained moment, she said, “I had an abortion.” She crossed her arms in front of herself, still not looking at either Maggie or Kara. “I was only nineteen, Kara wasn’t even eighteen yet. We didn’t know anything about what could happen, whether I could even carry a half-alien to term. There wasn’t anyone we could ask.” She choked and stopped, one tear running suddenly down each cheek, and Kara, face stormy and sad, knelt quickly next to the couch, reached over Maggie and took Alex’s hand. 

“I’m so sorry,” Maggie said quietly. “I didn’t mean to make either of you revisit that.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Kara said, just as quietly.

“That’s the complicated you were talking about earlier?” Maggie asked Alex.

Alex nodded. “Yeah. A lot of it.”

There were a few long moments of silence. Maggie broke the spell: “Kara. I gotta ask. You can get someone pregnant, but you’ve got a vajayjay, too. Can you also get pregnant?”

Kara shrugged. “Theoretically, sure. Though human sperm won’t do it; I’ve run tests.” 

“So is that what makes you female instead of male?”

Kara looked over at her. “I’m not,” she said simply.

Maggie goggled.

Kara smiled wryly. “I have the physical characteristics and the social presentation that you associate with ‘female,’ but Kryptonians don’t have two sexes. Or, more accurately, every Kryptonian is two sexes.”

“So, Clark’s got ...”

“The same stuff I’ve got,” Kara finished. “He chose, or I should say it was decided for him, that he was male.” She shrugged. “And so he is. If I had been perceived as male when I arrived on Earth, I’d probably have adapted and presented as male also.” 

Maggie dropped her head back onto the arm of the sofa and stared up at the ceiling. “That ... is ... a mindfuck.”

“Tell me about it,” muttered Alex.

Maggie rolled her head to the side so that she was looking at Alex. “So, let me get this straight.”

“So to speak,” Kara murmured.

Maggie ignored her. “Your first sexual experience was with an alien who looks like a girl but kind of isn’t, who was living with you and your family as your _sister_. You never talked about the fact that you were having sex, and you both more or less convinced yourselves that you weren’t, because it wasn’t the kind of sex either of you expected. It was obviously impossible for you to get pregnant doing what you were doing, but you _did_ get pregnant, and you had to have an abortion that obviously wrecked you. And then you totally walled your sex life off from every other part of your life until you were almost thirty.”

“That’s about it, yep,” Alex said.

Maggie rolled her head back to face the ceiling. “No wonder you were such a mess,” she said. “It’s amazing you’re functional at all.”

Alex frowned. “Thanks?”

All three of them were quiet for a few more moments. “It’s a lot to take in,” Maggie said finally.

“I know,” Alex said.

“Do you want me to go?” Kara said in a small voice. “I can go.”

“No, no,” Maggie said. “I’ll go. You guys have a lot to talk about.”

“I don’t want anybody to go yet,” Alex said. She wasn’t sure what she did want, but the two most important people in her life were sitting next to her, they were all having a conversation that she couldn’t even have imagined a day ago, and so far, she wasn’t losing either one of them.

Kara and Maggie exchanged a look. “Okay. We’ll stay,” Maggie said comfortingly. “Though, Kara,” she added, “you could put some pants on.”

“Oh Rao,” Kara exclaimed, jumping up and turning around, looking for her jeans. Alex burst out laughing, and Maggie chuckled with her. Kara was grinning, too, when she came back to the couch with all her clothes on.

“Okay,” Kara said. “Now what?”

Alex and Maggie looked at each other, the laughter fading. It was an excellent question.


	3. Chapter 3

“This isn’t the way I’d usually suggest handling a touchy interpersonal situation that requires forthright communication,” Maggie said thoughtfully, “but it might not be a bad idea if we all had a drink.” She pointed at Alex. “One drink, Danvers, not a bath in a bottle of bourbon.”

Alex saluted. “Heard and understood.”

“Not to be a pain,” Kara interjected, “but remember the whole ‘alien constitution not affected by alcohol’ thing?”

“A- _ha_ ,” Maggie exclaimed. She went over into Alex’s kitchen, clambered lithely up onto the counter, and from the highest cabinet extracted a square glass bottle with a red wax seal over the mouth. She displayed it to Kara. “Authentic extraplanetary hooch,” she said proudly. “Guaranteed nine thousand proof or whatever it is you superhuman types require to get loaded.” She jumped down from the counter, and Kara zipped over to seize the bottle before Maggie could land on the kitchen floor (and potentially, probably, drop her prize).

“It’s the molecular structure that makes it effective, not the proof, but whatever,” Kara said, staring at the bottle now in her hands. “You know this is totally illegal for humans to possess, right? How did you get it?”

“Of course I know it’s illegal,” Maggie replied, picking herself up off the floor. “I’m a cop. I arrest people who have this stuff without a permit. And as for how I got it, it helps to have an ex who’s an alien and a bartender.” She glanced over at Alex. “Who I hardly ever see. And try never to mention.”

Alex rolled her eyes. “What? I never said a word about her.”

“Exactly,” Maggie said.

“Anyway, what are you doing hiding that in my apartment?” Alex demanded.

Maggie shrugged. “I just thought it was much more likely that we’d be hanging out and need to have a drink with Kara at your place than at mine.” She cocked her head. “And I was right.”

Alex pulled out the cut-glass decanter that had belonged to Eliza’s mother and that Maggie was pretty sure contained a fifth of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve. Most of a fifth, anyway. “This calls for the good stuff for us too,” she said to Maggie, who turned and got three highball glasses from the kitchen cabinet.

After the pouring and the glass-clinking, and the first swig, Maggie nudged Alex in the ribs. “Okay,” she encouraged. “Go ahead.”

Alex looked at her blankly.

“Alk-tay to your ister-say,” Maggie stage-whispered. “You do remember why we’re all here, right? And drinking?”

“Oh.” Alex’s lip curled as if she’d eaten something nasty but was trying to be polite. “We have to talk more than we already have?”

“Yes, more. Remember the text? The one you actually asked her over here to discuss?” Alex made a helpless pathetic gesture with her hand. “Don’t be like that, Danvers. Woman up.”

Kara, who had been watching the exchange, snorted and then put her hand over her mouth. “I was totally not laughing at you, Alex. Totally not.” Then, to Maggie, she added, “You’re right. Alex and I have to talk.” Her clear blue eyes, hopeful and sad, moved back to Alex’s.

Alex took a deep breath. Kara took a deep breath. They stood looking at each other long enough that it began to feel tense. Then they burst out simultaneously:

“I know you need—”

“I never should have asked—”

And they both stopped again.

Maggie gave an exaggerated sigh. “All right, ladies.” With a glance at Kara, she corrected herself, “Or, you know, whatever. People. Living beings? Let’s go sit on the couch.” She took each of them by a shoulder and frog-marched them over into the living room, pushing them down on the couch a few feet apart. “Now. Face each other. Excellent.” Maggie sat down on the coffee table, which Alex did not, for once, reprimand her for.

Then Maggie pointed at Alex. “You first. Talk. Not to me, to her.”

Alex looked over at Kara with the ghost of a smile. “Right. So.” She closed her eyes and then opened them with determination. “All those years ago, when we first—when I first—” She stopped, groping for words, and then said simply, “I’m sorry.”

Kara looked puzzled. “What are you apologizing for?”

“I pushed you into being physical—” She swallowed and corrected herself. “Into having sex with me. I started something that—”

“No!” Kara broke in. “I asked you for something that it wasn’t fair to ask. It was selfish. And then I made you feel obligated—”

“Kara, no,” Alex interrupted her. “It was my responsibility to say no. To stop. You didn’t understand what sex meant in human culture. And I—” Alex looked slightly sick but continued, a little lower. “I wanted you.” That hung in the air for a moment, until Alex finished bitterly, “I took advantage of you.”

Kara’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. “What?” she sputtered. “Do you really think—You really do.” She looked stricken. “Oh, Alex.”

Alex stared at a spot on the wall over Kara’s head. “I fucking _molested_ you, Kara. I’m a creep, I’m—I don’t know how to make it up to you. I don’t know how to fix it.” Her voice was trembling.

Maggie felt her heart contort painfully and she was suddenly afraid. She’d had no idea that Alex felt like this. She’d thought the three of them were going to negotiate the parameters of an unusual but containable sexual arrangement, but Alex had abruptly elected to open an ammunition depot with a blowtorch. She opened her mouth, but she could think of nothing to say.

Kara, however, responded immediately with a sharp, practical tone. “Alex Danvers. Shut. Up.” She took Alex’s face between her hands, forcing Alex to look at her. “You think I didn’t know what I was doing? I knew. Of course I knew. Better than you did, obviously.”

Alex shook her head, as well as she could between Kara’s firm hands.

“I’d been on Earth for more than a year, Alex,” Kara went on. “You think I didn’t understand what sex was? Sex is the first thing you learn here. Sex is everywhere. There’s so much that you can’t even see it, like fish can’t see water. Every interaction, every story, every relationship, and don’t even get started on media. Commercials, for crying out loud. You humans can’t talk about _toothpaste_ without making it about sex.” She shook Alex’s head gently for emphasis. “I knew about sex. And if by some miracle I hadn’t, I would have known the moment I took you into my body.”

Alex put her hands over Kara’s and took a great gasp of air, and then she was crying, breaking, broken.

Kara didn’t let up. “Do you remember what you said to me, the first time? You were lying over my back. You still had your fingers inside me. You stroked my hair and you told me how beautiful I was. You called me ‘my Kara.’ ” A tear rolled down her cheek, too. “And I felt it, Alex, I felt beautiful. I felt like I was yours. And I felt like a whole person for the first time since Krypton. So don’t tell me there was something creepy or sick or wrong about that.” 

Now Alex was crying like Maggie had never seen anybody cry: gulping and sobbing and making rough wheezing noises. Kara folded her into her arms, holding on to her, and Maggie slid to the floor next to the couch and wrapped her arms around Alex, too. 

Alex cried. Keening, howling, screaming sounds of grief and pain ripped from her throat, and still she cried. It went on until Maggie was beginning to be really worried—had Alex utterly shattered? Did they need some kind of intervention? And just as she was steeling herself to call the DEO med staff and request an emergency sedative, Alex began to wind down. 

Her sobs slowed and quieted until, after a few minutes, she was simply taking shaky deep breaths. Kara murmured to her, “That’s right, Alex. You’re okay. We’re here and we love you and everything’s going to be okay.”

Maggie tightened her arms around Alex and burrowed her head into her ribs. She still felt too frightened and overwhelmed to speak.

“Let’s move over to the bed, Alex, okay? I think you should lie down. Let’s get a blanket over you.” Kara was still speaking soothingly, but Maggie registered her concern. She too could feel Alex shaking, still so close to coming apart, or perhaps coming finally, painfully, delicately together.

Kara stood and scooped Alex up into her arms; Alex looped her arms around Kara’s neck, miraculously uncomplaining, as Kara took her over and settled her gently into the center of Alex’s enormous bed. Maggie followed with the glasses, stopping to grab a tray so that there would be a place to put them. 

Kara pulled the comforter over Alex and lay down behind her, spooning her. Alex’s red, heavy-lidded eyes found Maggie and held her gaze, telling her silently of her gratitude and love.

 

 

Half an hour later they had spread out on the bed. Alex was sitting crosslegged, the comforter draped over her shoulders, Maggie was leaning against the headboard with her legs out straight, and Kara was lying on her side facing them at the foot of the bed.

“All right,” Kara was saying, speaking with the deliberate precision of inebriation. “Frustrated. Yes, I am frustrated. I admit to frustration. I feel like I’m not very—” She searched for the word. “Connected. Here. Connected here to this planet I’m on.”

“You think sex will connect you?” Alex asked. 

Kara shrugged. “It always did,” she said. “Obviously,” she went on, “I can’t have sex with anyone who doesn’t already know I’m Kryptonian. And not all of those,” she added as an afterthought. “I mean, Eliza? J’onn? I don’t _think_ so. That leaves, like, three people on the planet.” She wrinkled her nose. “And one of those is Winn.”

“Who is a great guy,” Maggie put in.

“Oh yes,” Kara said. “But not ...” She gestured, unable to think of a polite way to put it.

“Not someone you’d have sex with in a million bajillion years,” Alex finished.

“That,” Kara said, pointing at Alex.

Maggie said, “I thought I had it hard as a teenage dyke in small-town Nebraska. But you definitely get the prize for limited romantic options.”

Kara shrugged and turned her glass around and around on the tray Maggie had put in the center of the bed. “I’m a dead end, anyway,” she said. “Last survivor of a dead planet. Raised in a dead culture. Who’d tie themselves to me?”

“I _have_ ,” Alex said. “Jeez, Kara, you’re a maudlin drunk.”

Kara was shaking her head. “You have a real relationship now,” she said, raising her glass in Maggie’s direction before taking a sip. “Real future. I know, I know,” she interrupted Alex before she could object, “you love me and I’m part of your life forever and all that. But we aren’t going to be”—she waved her glass between Alex and Maggie—“like that.”

Maggie saw Alex’s eyes filling, and she knew that Alex had to reestablish Kara’s place in her life, and she wondered how the hell this could possibly play out without her losing the fantastic gift that was Alex Danvers. Alex was strong and her love was fierce, but either Kara _or_ Maggie was a lot to take on. Maggie didn’t begrudge Kara what she needed, but it would take a lot of strength to walk away and leave Alex to her. And she would have to do it soon. The thought stabbed painfully, making it hard for her to get a full breath, harder to face than she could have imagined.

Alex crawled down the bed to Kara, almost upsetting the tray, which Maggie leaned forward to rescue and put aside. “We’re different,” Alex said, taking the glass from Kara and handing it back to Maggie. “But we aren’t less than.” She lay down facing Kara, putting her arm around her. 

“I think about her a lot,” Kara said in a voice so low Maggie could hardly hear it. “About the ... baby.” She brought out the last word reluctantly. “Not that she was ever a baby, really. But, you know ...”

“I know,” Alex said, her tone tender and regretful. “I think about her too.”

“I wish it had been different,” Kara said. “If we’d been older. If we’d had the medical staff from the DEO to help us.” 

Alex stroked Kara’s hair, pushing it back from her face, tucking it behind her ear. “Oh, honey. I know.”

Maggie was certain that she should not be watching this. It was a moment of such raw pain, such intimacy, over a story that she was not a part of. It was time for her to go. She started to move stealthily off the bed.

“Don’t you dare, Maggie Sawyer,” Kara said, still looking at Alex. “Just because we’re talking about stuff that’s years old doesn’t mean you aren’t involved.”

Maggie sighed, but acquiesced. She moved down and lay behind Alex, one hand on Alex’s hip, and put her forehead against the back of Alex’s neck. “Okay. I’m here.” She couldn’t see a way that the two of them could resolve this brokenness that didn’t leave her out, but Kara was right, she was involved. She might only be there to pick up the pieces afterward, but she would be there.

“I wish I hadn’t been such a chickenshit child,” Alex said heavily.

“You say that like you chose to be childish. You _were_ a child,” Kara pointed out. “We both were.”

Alex sighed deeply. “Yeah, I guess.”

“And it had nothing to do with your courage. A half-Kryptonian embryo—Alex, it could have _killed_ you to have that baby.”

Alex made a noise, a grunt of acknowledgment neither positive nor negative.

“I’m sad that it couldn’t happen, Alex,” Kara said. The intense seriousness of her face and voice was so un-Kara-like that Maggie had to remind herself whose words she was hearing. “But I’m not upset that you didn’t try to go through with it. I would never risk your life, you hear me?”

Alex said something indistinct, and Kara frowned. Maggie quirked an eyebrow. “What? Not all of us have superhuman hearing, Danvers.”

Alex heaved a sigh. “I said, I would.” She rolled half onto her back so that she was talking, at least nominally, to Maggie, though she was really addressing the ceiling. “I _do_. I risk my life all the time. But then, when I could have given Kara ...” She shook her head. “I didn’t.”

Maggie said, quiet but with force, “I’m glad.” She threaded her fingers into the belt loop on Alex’s jeans and tugged, just to remind her that they were connected. “I might never have met you. And I don’t want to live in that world.”

“Me either,” Kara added.

Alex ran a lazy hand up Kara’s side, and when she reached the top of her ribs she brushed her knuckles in a circle over Kara’s breast, slowly, deliberately. _Time to change the subject,_ Maggie thought.

Kara started. “Alex. No.”

“You need me, Kara. You said so. I know so. And I told you that I would always be there for you.”

Kara was already shaking her head. “No, Alex, no. That was a mistake today, a stupid thing to do. As soon as I sent that text I realized what I’d done, what I was asking.” She held up a hand as Alex started to interrupt. “No. We’re adults now, Alex, and we can’t get away with pretending any more. I asked for something that was out of line.”

Alex glanced at Maggie, then turned her head back toward Kara. “I’m not suggesting we pretend any more, Kara.”

Kara furrowed her brow and slowly shook her head, uncomprehending. 

“I love you, Kara. I love your spirit and your optimism and your bravery and your quirks and”—a deep breath, a look of love and longing—“I love your body. I’ve missed your body.”

Kara looked befuddled, shifted her eyes over to Maggie.

Maggie gave a small, encouraging smile. “It’s okay, Kara.”

“But Alex. What you’ve got with Maggie is so good.”

“Yeah, it is. And I’m not giving it up.” Alex waited for that to sink in all around.

Maggie felt a rush of electric exultation and she couldn’t suppress the smile that burst over her. Alex would not give her up. She hadn’t expected Alex to have the capacity to take care of them both, to reassure and reconnect and love them both, but she had underestimated her, again.

Kara’s face was a soft portrait of bemused wonder. “So you’re saying that you’d—have sex—with me—and be with Maggie too.”

Alex pointed a finger gun at her. “Head of the class.”

Maggie, flushed with love and gratitude and happiness, said gently, “It’s okay, Kara. We’ll figure it out together. It won’t always be easy but—” She shrugged. “The really satisfying things usually aren’t.”

Suddenly Kara broke into a huge grin. “It’s kind of like being home,” she whispered. 

“What do you mean?”

She lifted an eyebrow. “It’s complicated.”

“We’re smart,” Alex promised. “Try us.”

“Okay. I’ll try.” She paused a moment, thinking. “On Krypton, the social expectation was that you’d have several ... intimate relationships. Not all of them sexual, necessarily. Maybe not any of them sexual. But— One of the things that was hardest for me to wrap my head around is the way that humans expect to have sex, companionship, intellectual challenge, and domestic compatibility bundled up into one package and delivered to them, for life. Kryptonians don’t do that.” She grimaced. “Didn’t.”

“So Kryptonians separated sex and love?” Maggie frowned. “That sounds like Daxam to me.”

“No, no,” Kara objected. “Daxamites privileged sex over love and companionship. They made it a _sport_. Kryptonians would have one or two long-term lovers, live with a marriage partner, and engage in several deep, purposeful friendships. If you didn’t have enough people in your life, it was a concern. It wasn’t healthy.”

Alex and Maggie were quiet, digesting this. “So we’re being Kryptonian,” Alex said finally. “That’s kind of awesome.”

Kara bounced up and down a little. “So, maybe we could get on with the being Kryptonian.” She batted her eyelashes at Alex, who laughed and rolled back up on her side to face her.

“You’re drunk, Kara.”

Kara shook her head. “Sadly, no. My metabolism processes alcohol really fast, even the alien stuff. I’m about ninety percent sober already.” She smiled ruefully. “I’m a very expensive date.”

Maggie flopped back down behind Alex and said, her voice muffled by the collar of Alex’s shirt, “Will you kiss her already?”

Alex’s body went very, very still. They could all almost hear her thinking through the mechanics and the consequences.

“Please, Alex,” Maggie whispered into her hair. “I’ll leave if you want me to, but I’m not going to be the thing that keeps you apart. You need each other, and I think you need each other now.” 

“Don’t go, Maggie. Stay right here.” Alex’s voice was gentle but commanding. Maggie closed her eyes, nodding against the back of Alex’s head, and she felt rather than saw Alex slowly roll closer to Kara; she heard the soft sounds of their lips meeting and parting. She sensed Kara’s hand on Alex’s face, then heard and felt fingers sliding into Alex’s hair just above Maggie’s head. There were more and wetter noises, then tiny groans and harsh breaths, and Maggie felt from the bunching of Alex’s muscles and the shifting of her shoulder blades that the urgency was building. Alex’s abdominal muscles tensed under Maggie’s palm, and Maggie felt a first, tentative movement of Alex’s hips.

 _Should I be freaked out by this?_ Maggie wondered. She wasn’t. She felt warm and close and increasingly turned on. She lifted up a couple of inches and kissed the back of Alex’s neck.

Then Alex’s hand groped back and found her thigh; stroked slowly down; and at the edge of her reach gripped the back of Maggie’s knee and pulled her leg up and over Alex’s own. Maggie’s breath stopped. Alex was deliberately, unmistakably drawing her in.

The next thing she felt was a hand on her cheek—not Alex’s. Fingertips circled lazily, and when she opened her eyes she saw Kara up on one elbow, watching her over the back of Alex’s head.

“Maggie, are you all right with this? Really all right?” Kara’s voice had joy and wonder in it as well as doubt, and her eyes were clearer, her face more open than Maggie had seen for days. If Maggie had needed anything more to make her sure, the reemergence of Kara’s basic happy optimism would have done it.

“Absolutely,” she assured her, and reached up to mirror Kara’s touch on her face. Kara turned her head and kissed Maggie’s palm, and just like that, everything shifted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rating’s going to have to change with the next chapter. Just so’s you know.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to have left you hanging at that admittedly tantalizing point. If it’s any consolation, I was pretty eager to find out what was going to happen next too.

Kara dropped hungrily onto Alex, burying her face in the crook of Alex’s neck and starting to unbutton her shirt. Alex gave a little moaning gasp and bit her bottom lip; Kara was working on her neck with her mouth. 

Maggie recognized the flush of arousal on Alex’s face and chest. She had caused it often enough. And so she hated to do what she now had to do, but if it wasn’t done they would probably all be sorry later. She put her hand on top of Kara’s, stilling her progress toward Alex’s naked skin. “Whoa, Nellie. Slow down, everybody, okay?”

Kara looked up at Maggie as if Maggie had just kicked a puppy, and Alex glared at her murderously. “Alex,” Maggie said, gently and carefully, “fifteen minutes ago you were in hysterics. Are you really ready for this? We,” she waved at Kara to include her, “need to be sure. You need to be sure.”

Alex drew in a long, deep breath, and exhaled just as slowly. “That’s reasonable,” she said reluctantly. She was quiet for a moment, and then she pushed up onto her elbows to look at both of them. “I feel free,” she said. “I feel like something just broke apart inside me—not like I broke, but like something twisted and ugly that had me all contorted broke up and swept away.” She gazed at each of them in turn. “I feel ... free,” she repeated. “And now I really, really want to fuck.”

Maggie laughed, relieved. She trusted Alex to assert her own needs, provided she stopped taking care of everyone else long enough to check in on what they were. “Carry on, then,” she directed Kara. Kara grinned, and half a second later Alex’s shirt was on the floor.

“Now that,” Maggie said in awe, “is a superpower.”

“Just wait,” Alex assured her. “There’s a lot more where that came from.”

 

 

Half an hour later Alex knelt between Kara’s legs, Kara’s knees over her shoulders, pushing into her with all the weight of her body. She held her right wrist with her left hand to use the power of both her arms, which Maggie knew was considerable. 

Kara cried out each time Alex rocked forward, her face twisted in ecstasy. “Yes … so good, so _good_ …”

Maggie moved behind Alex and added her weight to the next thrust, which brought a wordless shriek from Kara. 

Alex turned her head for a hasty, sloppy kiss. “God, I love you,” she muttered, pushing forward again to another deep, primal sound from Kara.

Maggie reached around into the slick, sweaty space between Alex and Kara’s bodies and down to where Alex’s hand pumped in and out. Maggie stroked up with her thumb, finding the large mass of Kara’s ovipositor; as she rubbed a slow circle around it she felt it thicken and extend into her hand. She slid her fingers up and down the length of it, as well as she could given the space constraints, and Kara ripped the pillow she was clutching behind her head in half.

“Fuck fuck _fuck_ ,” Kara yelled. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, keep doing that!” Maggie kept doing it; Alex gave her some room by pushing up with her thighs, lifting their combined weight off Kara a little. Only seconds later Kara thrust her hips up, lifting both Alex and Maggie off the bed, and shouted hoarsely. Maggie felt a rush of warm wetness on her hand, and she also felt Alex pull her arm back abruptly. 

They all collapsed to the bed, a shaking, sweating mass. Alex flexed her hand with a wince, and Kara asked in a worried voice, “Did I hurt you?”

Alex shook her head. “A little cramping, but I pulled out before you really clamped down.” To Maggie she said, “She broke a bone in my finger once. I had to tell Mom that I slammed it in a car door.”

Maggie looked curiously at her own hand; the liquid on it was clear and thick. She touched her tongue to it experimentally. 

“Good?” Alex inquired, a laugh in her voice.

“Mmm-hmm,” Maggie answered, licking. “Tastes like girl sex.”

Alex took Maggie’s hand and brought it to her mouth. As she started slowly cleaning it with her tongue, there was a groan from beneath them. “You’re going to kill me. You know that’s going to kill me, right?”

“I think that’s the idea,” Maggie answered, watching Alex’s tongue run over her hand.

Alex smiled as she finished licking. “It doesn’t take much, apparently, Kara,” she said.

“Well, it’s been a while.” Kara looked a little embarrassed.

“How long is a while?” Maggie asked.

“Um ... about four years, I guess.”

Alex went utterly still. After a moment she breathed again and said, “You mean, not since the last time with me.” 

Kara shifted uncomfortably. “That’s ... yeah.”

“Oh, Kara, honey.” Alex’s voice was full of guilt. “Not James?”

“James,” Kara said, remarkably free of bitterness, “was freaked out by the not-human bits.” 

Maggie found herself reaching for Kara’s face, stroking with her knuckles, while she growled, “What a stupid bastard.”

Kara shrugged. “Yes and no. I can’t blame him, really. I have to admit,” she frowned slightly, “I’m not all that into that weird penis thing. Just hanging out there, all the time? It seems kind of grubby.”

Maggie whooped. “Yes, exactly.”

Alex was laughing too, though a little darkly. “I can’t believe I spent so much of my life settling for _grubby_.” Then she wriggled out from between them. “I have to go to the bathroom. You two stay here and amuse yourselves.” She raised an eyebrow suggestively as she left the room.

Alone without Alex, their naked skin damp with sweat, Maggie and Kara were both suddenly shy and silent. Kara, finally, giggled and reached out for Maggie, putting a hand on her hip. “How are you feeling? Is this all okay?”

“I feel ...” Maggie searched around for the words. “Incredible. Incredibly happy, incredibly horny.” They both laughed.

Kara looked suddenly serious. “You know, we haven’t ... touched yet, really.” 

Maggie was taken aback, but Kara was right. There had been no direct contact between them. “I guess not,” she said. Undressing each other had turned into a laughing, shouting wrestling match, Kara cheating with superspeed, Maggie and Alex finding themselves progressively nakeder until Kara allowed them to pounce on her and return the favor. Then Alex had flipped Kara onto her back and with one murmured “God, Kara, you’re wet” was fucking her. There hadn’t been much opportunity for exploration. 

“Do you want to?” Kara sounded more like the uncertain shy girl Maggie saw in public than she had for a while; Maggie recognized the attitude, finally, as Kara’s way of protecting herself from making mistakes. 

Maggie smiled slow and wide. “Of course I do.” 

Kara drew a slow figure eight on Maggie’s hip. “Can I kiss you?”

Maggie felt a flash, an infinitesimal twinge, of anxiety. She’d had threesomes before but always on an extremely casual basis—she’d thought one of the main advantages of multiple partners, in fact, was how shallow everything stayed. This was different. This was Kara, Alex’s Kara, and this kiss would change their dynamic, probably forever. “Of course,” she answered, keeping her voice as easy as she could.

“Your heart rate just shot up,” Kara observed, “and you’re hardly breathing.” She fixed wide questioning eyes on Maggie’s.

“I won’t pretend it’s not a big deal,” Maggie admitted. “It is. Very. But we knew that, right?”

Kara nodded.

“Then let’s not just lie here,” Maggie whispered. She put her hand on the back of Kara’s head and pulled her gently toward her.

At first it was tentative and shy, a sweet brush of lip on lip. But Kara moved in eagerly, and Maggie quickly lost herself in Kara’s mouth. 

The tiny part of Maggie’s brain that wasn’t occupied with the sensual experience of Kara’s tongue, Kara’s lips, Kara’s teeth, Kara’s taste, the little breathy noises that Kara made, marveled at how _Kara_ it was, kissing Kara. How different it was from kissing Alex, though it was just as full of sensation. 

Maggie had to break away to groan when Kara slid her hand onto her breast and took her nipple between thumb and forefinger. “God, Kara—” Then Kara replaced her fingers with her mouth and Maggie’s sounds stopped being words.

The bed next to them dipped, and they both looked over to find Alex staring at them slack-jawed. She swallowed when she met their eyes and said, “That is unbelievably hot.”

Kara said, “Glad you’re enjoying it. I think Maggie is too,” and she returned to her task, though to the other breast.

Maggie closed her eyes involuntarily, only to pop them back open when there was suddenly another mouth on her other nipple. Then a hand between her legs; she shut her eyes again to keep from knowing whose. The fingers stroked softly, teasingly, and then parted her lips to run along the wet, swollen cleft inside. They slid back and forth, clit to inner lips, ghosting inside and back out again, until Maggie was panting and thrusting her hips. Something was whispered from one to the other, and then more fingers, a different hand, pushing into her.

She had an arm around each woman, her fingers laced into Kara’s hair, her nails digging into Alex’s neck. She couldn’t have spoken a complete sentence for anything in the world, but she gave clear, direct orders: “Deep, now, goddam, deep—circles on my clit, please, yes, like that— _oh_ , oh, oh ...”

She had enjoyed sex with more than one partner when she’d had it, but she’d never been relaxed enough to come. That generally hadn’t been the goal anyway. But this felt like—it _was_ —the impossible combination of a fresh first time and the easy, comfortable lovemaking with a trusted partner. She wasn’t worried that she wouldn’t come; she wasn’t worried that there’d be bruised egos if she didn’t. She didn’t have to explain or apologize or maneuver to get what she needed. And so, when she started to feel the molten tightness deep inside, she didn’t chase it, she didn’t focus on it, she simply relaxed and let it grow and grow until it finally released and flooded her. 

She jackknifed with a cry of pleasure, and she heard Alex coaching Kara: “She’s not like me, you don’t have to pull out right away. Hold your fingers inside her, nice and deep ... let her ride it out and relax, but she’s not done yet ...” Maggie felt Alex lay a palm on her lower belly while the pressure inside her held firm against the pulses, the way she loved it. “Now pull out, slow, and push up toward my hand ...” Maggie cried out again as the fingers in her, Kara’s fingers, dragged along the tender wall. “You feel that?”

“Wow,” Kara breathed. Maggie cracked open her eyelids and saw the two heads together over her, blonde and dark, the wondering expression on Kara’s face matched by a smug pride on Alex’s. _She likes sharing me,_ Maggie thought. But her ability to think was abruptly derailed when Alex said, “Now push back in. Up toward my hand. Oh yes,” and Maggie gave a deep, loud animal sound. 

Finally Maggie grabbed Kara’s wrist and stopped her. “Enough,” she panted. “I can’t anymore. You gotta pull out of me.”

“Do I have to?” Kara sounded disappointed. 

“Yes,” Alex said sternly. “Don’t break her.” 

They lay together in a tangled heap, Maggie sandwiched in the middle, drifting. Then suddenly Alex raised her head and frowned, taking stock of something she hadn’t seen before. “Kara. That was a memory foam pillow. Do you know how much those cost?”

“Yeah, well, tell your girlfriend to keep her hands off me then,” Kara said unrepentantly. 

“Somehow,” Alex said, mock-pensively, “I don’t think that would go over so well.”

“Uh-uh,” Maggie said, though she was only barely able to speak. “Def’ not.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there's that rating upgrade. Hope you're having fun. I did.


	5. Chapter 5

Maggie must have slept for a few minutes, since she woke with a start. She was still lying naked between naked Alex and naked Kara, which meant she had not been dreaming. 

She scooted off the bed and padded to the bathroom. Looking at herself in the mirror while she washed her hands, she couldn’t stop grinning. _You lucky woman,_ she told her reflection. _You bagged both the Danvers sisters. At the same time. In fact, you’re not_ done _bagging the Danvers sisters._ She laughed out loud at the thought. She had been bagged pretty thoroughly herself.

When she returned, she found that a play fight was in progress, Kara trying to push Alex’s legs open (or pretending to, since of course if Kara had really wanted to, Alex couldn’t have stopped her) and Alex closing them, laughing.

“Let me look,” Kara pleaded. “You never let me look.”

“Kara, it’s embarrassing.”

Maggie slid in behind Alex, spooning her and kissing her shoulder, and then reached down and grabbed her firmly behind the knee. She pulled Alex’s leg up, opening Alex’s cunt to Kara’s appreciative gaze. She murmured into Alex’s ear, “Don’t be embarrassed that you’re beautiful. You’re so pretty, so soft and wet for us, of course Kara loves to look at you.” Alex smiled and hummed and acquiesced, letting herself drop back onto Maggie, letting Maggie spread her open.

Kara stared openmouthed. After a few rapt moments, she leaned in, close, closer, and rubbed her face into Alex.

“You total goof,” Alex laughed, “you ... oh God.” Kara had settled in a little more seriously and engaged her tongue. For the next minutes, Maggie watched Alex’s face twist in concentration and sharp pleasure, her eyes closed, her high little moans and whimpers urging Kara on; Maggie couldn’t really see Kara between Alex’s legs but she could hear the gorgeous liquid sounds of wet mouth and wet cunt.

Then Alex began to stiffen, and Kara drew back. “Oh no,” she said. “You don’t come yet.”

“Oh, Kara,” Alex half-sobbed. She reached down and grabbed a fistful of Kara’s hair, trying to pull her back in against her. 

Kara just shook her head. “Nope.” She brought her hand up to Alex’s pussy, drawing her fingers back and forth over swollen, tender flesh, and she smiled a dazzling, innocent smile. “No coming until I get to spend some time inside you,” and she suited her actions to her words, pushing in and evoking a tortured groan from Alex.

Maggie held Alex’s thigh up and over her own body while Kara propped herself up on one elbow and fucked Alex with the other hand, lazy and slow. Alex keened softly and tried to buck her hips, trying to drive Kara deeper into her, but Kara just shook her head again, a little smile on her lips; the sticky smacking sounds of her fingers moving in Alex stayed measured and gentle.

“I want to be inside you with my ovi,” Kara said, soft and longingly. 

“I want you to,” Alex replied fervently. “It’s amazing. I remember.” Then she looked mock-sternly at Kara. “But I could do without the pregnancy part.”

“Will a regular condom work?” Maggie asked.

“I’ve never tried,” Kara said, “but it should.” She pulled her fingers out of Alex, who protested with a loud, incoherent sound, and raised herself up on her heels and accepted the little envelope that Maggie dug out of the nightstand. “What are you doing with condoms in your nightstand, Alex?”

“Sharing,” Alex said succinctly. 

Kara still looked confused and suspicious. Maggie elucidated, “So we don’t have to stop and wash up the equipment when we’re taking turns.”

The light dawned. “Ah!” Kara exclaimed. “Clever.”

“It’s not actually rocket science,” Alex said dryly. “And I know from rocket science. Get _on_ with it, girl.”

Kara opened the condom and took it out, holding it delicately with two fingers and frowning as, with her other hand, she opened the slit between her legs and coaxed out the thick, glistening shaft of her ovi. Alex reached up and helped her roll the condom on, a little smile on her lips, the moment inexplicably tender. 

“Someday,” Kara said low to Alex; Alex nodded slightly, holding Kara’s gaze. Maggie felt weirdly intrusive, knowing what Kara was obliquely referring to. 

As if she could hear Maggie’s thoughts, Alex turned her head, put her fingers to Maggie’s cheek, and echoed, “Someday. Maybe.” Their eyes met, and Maggie realized Alex was including her, inviting her, into this potential future. She felt a flare of something unknown—hope, perhaps; excitement, anticipation, belonging. She had to remind herself, _We’re having sex. People say things when they’re having sex._

Then Kara settled over Alex, smiling, whispering in her ear, and Alex sighed and wrapped her legs around Kara’s waist, and with the smooth roll of Kara’s hips into Alex’s, Maggie could tell they were joined. She watched in fascination. What they did wasn’t like any heterosexual intercourse or even strap-on lesbian sex that she’d ever seen depicted, experienced, or imagined. Alex held Kara in the cradle made by her legs, and Kara didn’t thrust or even rock so much as she seemed to rub herself slowly and minutely against Alex. Maggie remembered what Alex had said about Kara’s ovi: _mobile_. She could hear the soft, wet clicks and squelches of slow, deep sex even as Alex and Kara held almost still together.

Maggie inched closer and put her hand on the small of Kara’s back. Kara turned her head just enough to catch Maggie’s eye, and grinned at her. Maggie knew the expression on her face had to be astonished and reverential.

Kara turned back to Alex. “Good?” she asked, looking into Alex’s face.

“Mmm-hmm,” Alex answered, head back, eyes half closed. She smiled and reached out blindly to stroke Kara’s cheek, ending with her fingers tangled in the hair at the back of Kara’s head.

Kara put her forehead down onto Alex’s breastbone and closed her own eyes. The two of them lay together, rocking very slightly but otherwise apparently unmoving. That something unseen was happening, however, was obvious, and not just because Maggie could feel Kara’s muscles moving under her palm. The wet sounds intensified. Alex bit her lip, rolled her head from side to side; Kara whimpered softly, rhythmically. 

“Kara,” Alex breathed. “Like that ... yes, just like that.” She ran her hands up and down Kara’s back, and Kara moaned. 

Kara began to thrust just a tiny bit; Alex drew a sharp breath, and Kara slid her hands under Alex’s shoulders and gripped them. They were both breathing more and more heavily. 

“Oh,” Alex said suddenly, loudly. Her eyes opened big and surprised. “Oh. Oh, yes.”

Kara grinned in delight, lifting her head again to meet Alex’s eyes. They stared at each other, awe in their expressions.

Alex sucked in a deep breath. “Oh Kara,” she said. “I’m so close. Can you feel—”

“Yes,” Kara said, intense and focused. “Yes. I feel you. Come on, baby, come on, let go ...”

And then Alex made an ululating _ahh_ sound in the back of her throat that Maggie had never heard before, clutched Kara tightly with her legs and arms, and, after a few long seconds and a few powerful thrusts of her hips, collapsed. 

Kara drew back, and Maggie could hear the gentle suction as she pulled herself from Alex.

Alex murmured, “Oh honey, you didn’t ...”

“It’s okay,” Kara assured her. 

“I’ll take care of you,” Alex insisted, reaching down with a floppy hand.

“Don’t,” Kara admonished, laughter in the word. “I can take care of myself.” She peeled off the condom and looked at it in consternation. “What do I do with this?”

Maggie reached over and took it from her fingers. “You didn’t come?”

Kara shook her head. Maggie tossed the condom on the floor. “We’ll worry about it later,” she told Kara. “Now. _I’m_ going to take care of you.” She eased herself over next to Kara’s hips, where Kara held her ovi in one trembling hand.

“You don’t have to—” Kara began.

“I _want_ to,” Maggie said firmly. And she did. She replaced Kara’s hand with her own, surprised at the warmth and wetness of the shaft, amazed at the feeling of muscular solidity. 

Maggie settled in on her knees and looked the ovipostitor up and down in fascination, touching it gently with her fingers. It was about six inches long, she guessed, and as thick as the thickest cock she and Alex had; like a human’s, it was veined, the skin stretched taut over ridges of muscle. It had no distinct head but it did have an opening at the tip. 

Kara groaned, and Maggie remembered what she was supposed to be doing. She leaned forward and licked the tip; it tasted like the ejaculate she’d taken off her hand earlier, the musky salt of a woman’s cunt. She heard Kara’s sharp inhalation and felt a quick, immediately stifled twitch of her hips, and smiled. 

Maggie’s blowjob experience was limited to some rather unsatisfying performances on dildos for girlfriends; it was an act that had never done much for her, but it seemed to excite the women she’d done it for.

This was different. Here her mouth took in a warm, living thing, with its smell and taste and pulse, and Kara gasped and jerked with the motion of Maggie’s tongue. 

It was a little awkward and it took a few moments before Maggie got the hang of sliding her mouth up and down by bobbing her head, trying to touch as much of the surface of the ovi as she could with her tongue and her palate and the insides of her cheeks. She felt a hand stroking the back of her head, which from the angle she deduced was Alex’s. Just as Maggie was really beginning to feel like she had the rhythm, Kara cried out, and her mouth was suddenly full of fluid. 

Kara’s body melted against the mattress, the intense tension of a moment before exploded away. “Wow,” Kara said. “Just, wow.” Her voice was trembling. 

Maggie let the ovi pop out of her mouth, holding it and watching in fascination as it gradually softened and slid back into Kara’s body. “That is _so cool_ ,” she said.

Both Alex and Kara laughed, but it was Alex who replied: “It really is, isn’t it?”

Maggie shifted over and lay down between Kara’s legs, one hand on Kara’s belly, the other arm loosely wrapped around Alex’s hips. “That was beautiful,” she said quietly, to both of them, and watched them recovering.

Glancing up at Kara, Maggie asked, “So how soon can you do that again?”

Kara opened her eyes and looked down her body at Maggie, surprised and uncertain, but obviously pleased. “You want a turn?” she asked teasingly.

“I _demand_ a turn,” Maggie said. “But I’m warning you, we have to come up with a sexier word than ‘ovipositor’ for that thing.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took a long time, sorry. They kept wanting to talk to each other, and I couldn’t prevent them. I’m pretty sure we’ll be back to the smut in the next chapter, though.

Kara did, in fact, need some time before Maggie could get her turn. Maggie had a little fun teasing her about that, and then Alex rescued the comforter from where it had been pushed off the bed. There was a brief moment of uncertainty as they figured out how they were going to arrange themselves, eyeing each other for cues about who should go where, which Alex broke up by declaring, “Kara in the middle, she’s the warmest,” and curling herself into Kara’s right arm. Maggie shrugged—Alex ought to know, after all—and slid up next to Kara’s left side, feeling an arm wrap hesitantly, then more firmly around her. 

“Not in my wildest fantasies could I have imagined how this night would go,” Alex murmured drowsily.

“Me neither.” Kara giggled. “Well, maybe in my _wildest_ fantasies.”

Maggie lifted her head to give Alex a fishy look. “Really, Danvers? You bought a bed the size of a small country and it never occurred to you that you might entertain more than one person in it?”

Alex’s eyes were already closed, but she smiled. “I didn’t buy it for entertaining.”

“For what, then? Does it double as a raft in case of a flood?”

“No, but that’s not a bad idea, Sawyer.” Alex cracked one eye. “I bought it because it fit the room.”

Maggie scoffed. “Is that some feng shui shit?”

“Nope,” Alex said, closing her eyes again, “I mean just that. It fit the room. The apartment had different furniture in it when I saw it before I bought it, and there was a regular full-size bed here, and it looked dopey.”

“Wasted space,” Kara said. “Big enough so that you couldn’t put anything else around it, but it didn’t fill the space.”

“ ’Zactly,” Alex affirmed.

“ ‘It fit the room,’ ” Maggie muttered. “That’s how you buy _clothes_ , Danvers.” 

No answer. Alex was asleep. A very few minutes later, Maggie was too.

Kara lay holding the two women—her two women, her lovers—and sank into the warmth and peace of the moment. She had not been this content in ... perhaps she had never been this content. Certainly not on Earth. She had known this bubble of joy with Alex before, but it had been strained even as it had been marvelous and exciting. Alex had been jumpy and guilty and they had never, ever relaxed.

She stroked Alex’s shoulder with her thumb and kissed her gently on the forehead. Alex had a half smile on her face as she slept. That was new. 

Kara turned her head to look at Maggie, the less-known factor, the wild card. Maggie had brought Alex back to her, body and soul, and that was more than enough to make her Kara’s next-most-favorite person. She trusted Maggie, for no reason other than that Alex did and that she felt right. Maggie was also charming and sexy and funny and smart, and that was delicious icing on the cake.

Kara turned her head back again, drinking in the calm beauty of her sleeping sister. Here was the sweet center of her life, a truth that she tried to keep light but that was as heavy as the earth itself. Tracing the strong, sharp bones of Alex’s face with her eyes, she felt a familiar ache: so fragile, so brief.

She could tell already that neither Alex nor Maggie would wake to claim more time with her, and that was all right. She would have a full night with her arms around these precious ephemeral creatures she had chosen, who had, for this moment, chosen her. She settled in to print it into her memory.

 

 

Maggie woke in the half-light just before dawn, her usual time. She had rolled onto her side in the night and it took her a long moment to compute where she was. White sheets, firm mattress, edge of the bed seemingly several feet away—Alex’s. Right. She could feel the heat and drowsy energy of another body next to her, and she wiggled back to nestle her ass into Alex’s hip.

It wasn’t Alex’s hip. Maggie almost elevated off the bed as she spun around, heart pounding, and saw Kara lying on her back in the same position she’d been in the night before, with Alex nestled into her shoulder on the other side. _Kara. Right. Wow._ The previous evening rushed back, accompanied by the wonder and joy and affection and awkwardness and everything else that had been packed into those few hours.

Maggie settled onto her elbow, propping up her head so she could watch the two women. Kara’s eyes were half-slits, not closed but unseeing in a slightly eerie way; Alex was thoroughly out, her cheek resting in the hollow of Kara’s shoulder. Maggie felt her heart swell. She had never seen Alex fully at rest in this way, and she felt the privilege in being so trusted.

Kara murmured, “Morning, Maggie.”

Maggie smiled. “You aren’t asleep?”

“I don’t sleep,” Kara said, still very low so as not to wake Alex. “Not exactly, not the way you do. I rest, but for me it’s more like a deep meditation.”

“Sleep’s weird,” Maggie said. 

“It terrified me at first,” Kara said, her eyes still half closed. “Every night, everyone around me just drops into unconsciousness? And acts like it’s perfectly normal?”

Maggie laughed out loud, then checked herself, glancing over at Alex. Alex furrowed her brow and made a grumbly noise but didn’t open her eyes. Kara stroked her hair gently, and her touch seemed to settle Alex back into sleep. Maggie had just enough time to feel an ache of outsideness, of aloneness, watching the two of them lying together in such peace, before Kara reached out her other hand to Maggie, working her fingers into her thick dark hair.

The bubble of happiness in Maggie’s chest swelled again. She had gone to bed with more than one person before, but she’d never woken up with them, always choosing an early exit and a light goodbye. And she’d had relationships with more than one person at the same time—but separate relationships. An intimate relationship with two other people would be not just difficult but staggeringly difficult. Impossible. This, though ...

She put her hand flat onto Kara’s belly, moving her fingertips just enough to feel the almost-humanness of her skin and also the tiny indescribable difference. Was it that the movement of muscle was slightly unfamiliar? Was her skin itself a slightly different texture? Smoother or rougher? Maggie couldn’t tell. 

“You’re thinking very loudly,” Kara whispered.

Maggie smiled and rolled closer, pushing her hand up Kara’s body to rest it on her breastbone, where she could feel Alex’s breath on her fingers. “I’m thinking this is ...” Terrifying. Exhilarating. “... pretty amazing.”

“Mmm,” Kara agreed. She turned her head and opened her eyes fully, and Maggie stretched up without thinking about it and kissed her. 

It was a chaste peck on the lips, and Maggie began to draw back immediately, but Kara pulled her close with the hand she had in her hair. When Kara’s mouth met hers this time, it was lingering, exploratory, and not even a little chaste. Maggie lost herself in the feel of Kara’s lips, Kara’s tongue. Kara kissed like she did everything else: with curiosity and delight and innocent wholeheartedness. 

“Hey,” came Alex’s voice, sleepy but amused. “You’re getting started without me?”

“Mmm-hmm,” Kara hummed, her mouth too busy to make words. Then she gasped, and Maggie glanced down to see that Alex had turned her head just enough to take Kara’s nipple into her own mouth.

Maggie threaded her fingers into Alex’s hair, feeling the small, purposeful movements of her head as she tongued and sucked. Then Maggie moved back to Kara’s gasping mouth. 

As she kissed Kara, Maggie absorbed the keens and groans coming from Kara’s throat, which Kara produced without apparent distraction from the immediate project of kissing Maggie back. Kara’s kiss was a revelation: firm when Maggie needed firmness, melting when she wanted her soft; just the right amount of tongue, lip, tooth, nose, chin. She read Maggie nearly as well as Alex did. 

The sudden realization that Alex and Kara had—of course—honed their technique kissing _each other_ nearly made Maggie explode. She could see it, their teenage fumbles becoming smooth mutual pleasure ... Hardly noticing she was doing it, she slid her leg over Kara’s, bringing her cunt almost to the curve of Kara’s hip, pushing forward to get herself closer, closer. Then Kara’s palm was flat on the small of her back, pulling Maggie with impossible but gentle strength against her thigh, and Maggie had to break away from Kara’s mouth to groan as she finally got the pressure she ached for directly on her swollen flesh. And then

_BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP_

“Holy fucking mother of fuck,” Alex snapped, rolling to the side and grabbing the offending phone from her nightstand. 

Maggie groaned again, not from pleasure, and sank her head back into the pillow.

“It’s six o’clock,” Alex reported. “Why did you have your alarm set for six o’clock, Kara?”

“I have to be at work at six-forty-five,” Kara said meekly. “I’m sorry.” She took her phone from Alex’s hand.

“Since when do you take forty-five minutes to get to work?”

“I think a shower is called for,” Kara retorted. “And breakfast. And I have to go back home for my laptop. Also, _someone who shall not be named_ keeps telling me not to use my superspeed for regular life stuff.” She sat up, leaving both Alex and Maggie sprawled on their backs on the bed. 

“This,” Maggie said feelingly, “is not regular life stuff.”

“Granted.” Alex put her hand on Kara’s back and stroked her in a slow circle. “Maybe you should be sick today.”

“Alex,” Kara said, exasperated, “you know I’m always on the verge of losing this job, with all the time I have to take off.” She twisted from the hips, looking down at Alex and displaying her finely muscled back to Maggie. “And, sorry, do you really want me to believe that you aren’t going to work today?”

“I don’t have to be in till nine,” Alex grumbled.

“Well, I have to be in at eight,” Maggie said, sitting up next to Kara. “We just don’t have time to finish anything we might start right now.”

“I know, I know,” Alex groaned. “But we—” She paused, and _“might not have another chance”_ hung in the air, heavy though unspoken.

Kara stood up to collect her clothes, seeming easy and unburdened, and said, “I can come by tonight and you can have whatever you want.” Only Maggie was in a position to see the slight nervous flicker of her eyes as she said it; only Maggie saw Alex relax fractionally into the bed once she had.

 

 

The really difficult portion of the morning was the next one, the one in which they all had to get up and get dressed and get things done. Three people jostling in front of the sink and in and out of the shower wasn’t exactly comfortable even without the added layer of sex and worry, and there was still plenty of tension sitting with them at the kitchen island as they ate toast and drank coffee and tried not to look one another too deeply in the eye. 

Maggie realized that if they didn’t all acknowledge the elephant in the bedroom, they might well be very, very polite, leave for work, and never discuss the previous ten hours ever again. And that, she thought, would be tragic. _We’re three grown-ass women—all right, two grown-ass women and one grown-ass biologically hermaphroditic female-identified alien—and we can do better than this._

So she looked between Alex and Kara and said, “Okay. Ovipositor. We really have to do something about that.”

They both looked startled, then embarrassed, and at last Kara started to smile. “Ovi won’t do it, huh?”

Alex wrinkled her nose but smiled as well. “Sounds like the brand name for a pregnancy test.”

“It should have ‘woman’ in it somewhere,” Maggie offered.

Kara shot back, “No, it should be _in women_.” (Alex smacked her on the back of the head.)

“Anyway, what do you mean? Like, we should call it the ‘woman-lover’? The ‘womanroot’?”

(Groans all around.)

“ ‘Root’ isn’t bad, though. Can we work with that?” 

After a long pause, it appeared they couldn’t.

“Let’s start with what it does. It, um, penetrates ...”

“Sure, _penetrator_ is a super-sexy word.” (Thrown napkin.)

“Come on, focus.” 

“Orgasm generator?”

“Orgasmerator?”

Once they were all laughing too hard to speak, the conversation had to be shelved. But the corner had been turned; they had all acknowledged, out loud, out of bed, that they had a shared sexual life and vocabulary now. The tension remaining in the room was the kind of tension that wants to break into laughter, not the kind that makes everyone want to leave as quickly as they can.

When Kara did leave, she kissed Maggie first, a slow-lipped promise, and then she turned to Alex, giving her a long look while she held her cheek. “Tonight,” she said, and brought her mouth to Alex’s, smiling into the way Alex reached up for her. “I’ll see you both tonight.” And she was gone, leaving them at the island, staring at the door she’d just gone through.

“Well,” Maggie said at last, “that ... was ...” She searched for a word to finish with. 

Alex giggled. Alex Danvers, stone-cold gun-in-each-hand I’ll-fuck-you-up Alex Danvers, _giggled_. 

Maggie stared at her in astonishment. 

Alex said, “That was _impossible_. That could not have happened.”

“And yet it did,” Maggie said, still befuddled.

“It did,” Alex confirmed, putting her knuckles in front of her mouth to hide the grin.

There was a lengthy silence in which both of them drank coffee and didn’t look at each other. Finally Maggie said, “And now we ...?” trailing off suggestively, hoping Alex would finish the sentence with something that made sense.

Alex shrugged, a little manic smile still trembling at the corners of her mouth. “Now we’re both fucking my sister,” she said.

“And each other,” Maggie added.

“Oh yes. And each other,” Alex repeated.

“One thing,” Maggie said. “Can we maybe stop calling her your sister?”

Alex hesitated. “I—Well, no.” She avoided looking directly at Maggie. “She is my sister. At least, that’s the closest word we’ve got for what she is.” She wiped quickly under her eye, as if smoothing away an invisible tear. “She’s in my bones, you know? I’ll never not feel this protective thing about her, even though I also feel—” She gestured to indicate all the rest: commitment, dependence, desire. 

Maggie took a deep breath and made herself ask the question: “Is this gonna work?”

Alex was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “It has to work.”

Maggie cocked her head, a question in it. 

Alex looked directly into her eyes. “I can’t give either one of you up.”

And then, mother of God, Alex was on her knees in front of her, saying words that weren’t supposed to be said from that position. “I love you, Maggie. More than I could have imagined loving anyone—” A deep breath. “—except Kara.” From the visible terror on her face, it was clear she hadn’t exactly planned to say that. 

Maggie slid off her chair and into Alex’s arms, kneeling on the floor next to her. “I always knew how important she is,” she said, into the side of Alex’s neck. “I always knew how much of you she had. And I’m fine with that, Alex. I’m fine. Even like this.” _Especially like this,_ she thought. _This at least makes sense._

Alex said, “It was so hard to stay away from her. And now she’s here, she’s back, I have her again, and I can’t ...” She moved her own face down into the crook of Maggie’s neck. “I can’t be enough for her without you.”

Maggie took a moment to digest that. “Of course you can. Babe, you’re always enough,” she finally said. “You’re so strong, and so caring, and so fierce—”

Alex was shaking her head against Maggie’s. “Mags,” she interrupted. “I mean it. It’s real. I’ve been everything for Kara. Her sister and her teacher and her protector and her sounding board and her sparring partner. Being her lover too, God, Maggie, it’s too much. I can’t do it. I _shouldn’t_ do it.”

Maggie murmured, “It’s not healthy not to have enough people,” echoing Kara’s declaration of last night.

Alex nodded into Maggie’s neck. “But I _am_ her lover. Her _only_ lover.”

“Not any more,” Maggie interjected with a smirk.

Alex laughed. “Right. Not any more. And that’s such a relief, you can’t even imagine.” Suddenly serious, she pulled back a bit so that she could look into Maggie’s eyes, and she slid her hands up to hold Maggie’s face between them. “I need you too, Maggie.”

“I know,” Maggie said, but not as if she did. Who could need more than Kara, after all? Beautiful, and smart, and adorable, and _powerful_ beyond the imagination of most mortals. 

Alex, her eyes softening as if she could hear Maggie’s internal monologue, stroked Maggie’s cheekbones with her thumbs. “I told you that Kara’s in my bones. I didn’t choose that; it just was. That’s why I can’t really call her anything but my sister. But you—I _chose_ you.” She leaned forward to touch her forehead to Maggie’s. “Do you understand how different that is? How important that is?”

That one thing in your life could feel like something you did on purpose, not something that was dropped on you? That’s why Margarita Esperanza Suarez Ortega, Americanized without her input into Maggie Sawyer, was a cop, not a preschool teacher like her mother and all three of her sisters. She’d made a choice, and she’d done it, in part, so she could give people choices. “I get that,” she said, low and hoarse. “I really do.” And then she smiled, huge, into Alex’s neck. She was Alex Danvers’s choice. And it was going to work.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It took longer than I would have liked to bring this to the world, but at least there’s more to it than I expected. Two chapters for the wait time of one!
> 
> Fair warning, this chapter is a lot more talk. The next one will be more, uh, action-oriented.

Maggie spent the day in a daze. She absentmindedly asked her partner for a file on a case that had been closed for a year. She put non-dairy creamer in her coffee instead of sugar. She walked into the men’s locker room instead of the break room, twice. 

Maggie had had her fair share of sexual experience, and by many standards, a couple other women’s shares as well. She’d slept with aliens as well as humans. She’d slept with women she loved, women she didn’t, and women she thought she would love if she got the chance. She’d had threesomes, once, memorably, a fivesome; she’d slept with a girlfriend’s ex and an ex’s girlfriend. She prided herself on being up for nearly anything a partner wanted that wouldn’t cause permanent damage. She’d cheated and been cheated on, neither of which she ever wanted to endure again. But this … this promised to be the greatest adventure she’d ever had. 

It wasn’t going to be easy, she wasn’t kidding herself about that. She wasn’t entirely sure she was going to be capable of making it work—and she knew that she would have to take the lead in making it work. The relationship skills of the Danvers sisters combined could dance on the head of a pin with room left over for the Rockettes. 

 

 

Alex spent the day in a daze. When she didn’t carefully control it an enormous grin spread itself over her fierce professional mien. She caught a couple of agents looking at her in astonishment before she was able to school herself back into something suitably terrifying.

In the last twenty-four hours, she’d been shocked by the emergence of her safely buried past, terrified that she was going to lose the first functional relationship she’d ever had, released from her greatest and most deeply buried guilt, forced to acknowledge feelings she was only hazily aware she had, and shown the possibility of a life she’d never dared to imagine. She was a little overwhelmed. She was a lot ecstatic.

 

 

Kara spent the day cataloguing clippings. She took one break long enough to lift a couple of light-rail cars back onto the tracks after a brake failure. (A few minor injuries, nothing requiring more than basic first aid from the paramedics on the scene.) After that she focused on trudging at human speed through her work, and she had a rather productive day.

She had become very, very good at compartmentalization in her years on Earth. What happened after work would happen after work.

 

 

Alex called Maggie at eleven-thirty, having been able to do nothing more challenging than prep slides all morning.

“Maggie?”

“Hey, babe.”

“Did I have a massive hallucination? I think I had a massive hallucination. I think I’m having a psychotic break. I’m still at the sweet spot for adult-onset schizophrenia.”

Maggie laughed. “Not unless psychotic breaks are communicable. I’m fairly sure I had the same one.”

“The one where we got naked with Kara.”

“Yep, that one.” Maggie couldn’t resist going on: “It was a pretty good one. I enjoyed it.”

“Jesus, Maggie, what have I done?” The worry in Alex’s voice was painful to hear; she was clearly not interested in engaging in light banter.

So Maggie switched gears. “You did something that you needed to do, babe. Look, this might be a train wreck. I’m not going to sugarcoat that. But it’s obvious that not doing what we did yesterday wasn’t going to work indefinitely, either.”

Alex was silent for a few seconds; Maggie imagined her staring at the counter in front of her as if she could sear it with heat vision through simple concentration. “You’re right,” she said at last.

Maggie wished Alex could have seen her perfectly executed double take. “Can you let me get my voice recorder going and say that again? I have the feeling I’m only going to hear it a few times in my life.”

Alex rewarded her with a small chuckle. 

“Shit has happened to you and to Kara,” Maggie went on, “that just doesn’t happen. Period. Really. You two have been”—Maggie scrambled for a word that wasn’t _forced_ —“have been pressed by circumstance into a relationship that has absolutely zero precedent. You have no models. And of course you’ve fucked up, you both have, but at the end of the day you love each other and you’re there for each other. And you need each other.”

“That’s true,” Alex muttered.

“And you and me.” Maggie simply said it, not trying to lead Alex anywhere.

“We are awesome,” Alex said with a heat Maggie hadn’t expected.

“We are,” Maggie agreed. “Which is a good thing. This is going to be a fuckload of work, you know.”

“You think being Kara’s sister hasn’t been a fuckload of work all along?” Alex asked rhetorically.

Maggie could barely imagine. 

“Is there anything—” Alex paused and then said, “I was about to try to make you say it, but that’s chickenshit of me. I’m going to say it. There are things we do that I want to keep for us.”

Maggie heaved a grateful breath. She hadn’t been sure Alex would recognize this. “Yeah. Definitely. And that’s okay.” She went on, “I can’t really imagine cuffing the sunshine puppy to the headboard. To say nothing of the fact that she’d break the cuffs.”

Alex snorted. “I can just see the big blues looking at us, all confused.” She sighed. “She’d give it a try, because she’ll do whatever she thinks will make people happy, but she wouldn’t _get_ it.”

Maggie was thankful that they were having this conversation on the phone, so that Alex couldn’t see her looking relieved. The relief was entirely situational and directed only at Kara’s involvement. She didn’t want Alex to get the mistaken (the _extremely_ mistaken) notion that she, Maggie, wasn’t thoroughly enthusiastic about the kind of sex Alex had finally, nervously asked for. “I’d give it a try too, you know? If it would make _her_ happy. But ...”

“But I’m about ninety-nine percent sure it wouldn’t.” Alex sighed. “I—we should talk to her about it, I guess. I don’t want to keep it from her as if we don’t trust her. And she should have the right to decide for herself. Like I said, though, ninety-nine percent.”

“I think we’ll find,” Maggie said slowly, thinking it out as she said it, “that there’s going to be the stuff that’s good for all of us, and the stuff that’s yours and hers, and the stuff that’s mine and yours.”

“And,” Alex said, “the stuff that’s yours and hers. There has to be that too.” There was a certainty and an acceptance in her voice that Maggie was glad, though surprised, to hear. She smiled to herself. Way to go, Danvers, she thought. 

 

 

Maggie and Alex had, after some trials, settled on “cock” as the word they used for their dildos (a necessary conversation, since the only sex-related word less sexy than _ovipositor_ was _dildo_ ). It wasn’t perfect. Neither of them really liked the maleness of the word, though only Alex had real-life associations with the kind attached to men. _Cock_ did have a certain blunt straightforwardness that lent itself to the rough urgency of the moments when one of them was calling for it. It was vastly better than _dick_ or, God forbid, _phallus_. 

Kara didn’t have a cock. What she had was fascinating and wonderful and deserved the sexiest word they could find; but the quest for the right language was more challenging than Maggie had anticipated with her half-joking order of the morning. Throwing names around when they were together eating breakfast had devolved into farce with alarming speed.

Fortunately, there was a text chat.

KD: how about posit something? because it’s a positor and also positive right?  
MS: Positrator  
AD: that sounds like a brand name for my alien gun  
AD: also not sexy  
MS: how about just Kara’s sexybits?  
KD: i have more than one sexybit  
AD: looking for disambiguation here  
MS: tell me u know that word because of wikipedia  
AD: what?  
AD: no, linguistics  
MS: u don’t use wikipedia, do u  
AD: of course not.  
KD: can we get back to my sexybit?  
AD: which we are not calling a sexybit  
MS: what do u call it in kryptonian?  
MS: or do u say kryptonese?  
KD: kryptahniuo, if you’re kryptonian  
KD: the word is aorosh  
AD: hmmm...... that’s nice  
MS: how do u pronounce that?  
KD: AH-oh-rohsh  
KD: first part sounds like rao, which is hilarious now that i think about it  
AD: is it related to ehrosh?  
[AD direct message to MS: ehrosh means life - it’s also pt of how you say hello and goodbye]  
KD: could be. i’m not an entomologist  
AD: think you mean etymologist  
KD: right  
KD: i blame autocorrect  
MS: ANYWAY, it sounds good.  
MS: we should try it out.  
AD: the word or the body part?  
MS: both, obvs

 

 

Alex held out until three-fifteen before she called Kara.

“Hey,” she said, brightly and fakely, when Kara answered. She cringed internally hearing her own tone of voice, which made her sound like she was about to exclaim, “You’re the lucky tenth caller!”

“Hey Alex,” came Kara’s cheerful reply. It would have been the same tone, Alex reflected, whether Kara had spent the day rolling in an enclosure full of puppies and kittens or beating the crap out of some unspeakable evil from the far reaches of space and time.

“So yesterday evening ... was ...” Alex knew she was fishing for something Kara would be unlikely to provide. 

“Really fun,” Kara supplied promptly.

“Yeah. Fun,” Alex echoed. “Um, also kind of complicated, don’t you think?”

She heard Kara’s deep sigh on the other end of the line, which was theatrical, since Kara didn’t need to take a deep breath simply to oxygenate. “I think you’re overthinking it, Alex.” _The way you overthink everything,_ the unspoken tagline added.

“I want this to work,” Alex blurted out.

Kara answered with warmth and humor and love: “Then it’s going to work, Alex.” _Because you are everything, Alex Danvers. You are my anchor to this earth._

“I need—” Alex thought through what she said next, because if she told Kara she needed something, Kara would make it happen, whether it was cinnamon toast from a particular diner in Connecticut or a beltway of magnesium dust laid between Earth’s outer atmosphere and the rings of Saturn. “I need you and Maggie to develop something between you that isn’t about me,” she said at last.

Kara gave her the courtesy of a moment of contemplation. “Maggie and I need me and Maggie to develop something between us,” she said after that moment. “Because we love you, Alex. Both of us.”

Alex had never felt so responsible for anything in her life: and that was saying something, since she’d been not-subtly assigned the responsibility of Kara’s very survival from the moment she’d arrived at Alex’s parents’ house. She spread her hand out on the cool countertop next to her, pressing into its firmness. “Even if I’m worth that, Kara—”

The expected noise of protest came, and she ignored and overrode it.

“—it can’t just be about me. You get that, right?” She searched for and found the tangled thoughts she’d been having all day—that she’d been having for years, if she were to be honest about it. “You need more than me. You need more people who are close enough to you to catch you if you fall, Kara.” She swallowed and whispered, “My love.”

“I—” Alex could hear all the protest and denial in Kara’s one syllable, and then, after a long moment, she heard the truth: “I know.”

“Maggie will catch you,” Alex said. There was definitely not a tear welling its way out of her right eye and rolling down her cheek.

“I know,” Kara said again. “I know.”

 

 

Maggie womaned up before the workday ended and made herself tap the shortcut LIL DANVERS. _Gonna have to change that,_ she thought.

“Kara,” she gritted out, to complement the lilting “Hey Maggie!” she heard when Kara picked up.

“You sound grumpy,” Kara observed. There was rustling in the background that intimated that Maggie didn’t have Kara’s full attention. The diversion could be breaking news, a celebrity gossip site, or a cup of Dunkin Donuts Munchkins. It was impossible to tell.

“I’m not grumpy,” Maggie corrected. “Far from grumpy. The un-grumpiest I’ve been for quite some time.”

Kara laughed. “Okay, then what’s up? ’Cause something’s up.”

Maggie allowed some snark to infiltrate her tone. “Huh, did you maybe notice the _significant sexual situation_ that you and Alex and I have found ourselves in?”

Kara laughed louder. “As a matter of fact, yes, I did notice that.” She dropped her voice to a faux-mysterious tone. “The orgasms were a clue.”

“It’s going to be a little tough for us,” Maggie found herself saying. She hadn’t called to have a Talk; she’d hoped for some light banter and a promise for later, deeper exploration.

“Tough for which us?” If Maggie didn’t know better, she’d say that there was a little bite in Kara’s words. “Because Maggie, it’s not all that tough for me. I love Alex with my whole body and soul. And she loves you, so for you—anything you want.”

 _Anything you want._ For a moment, Maggie was thrown by the simple, complete declaration of intent. Then, dazzlingly, she realized what she was being offered—and what she had to be sure she was being offered for itself alone.

“You don’t have to give me anything,” she made herself say. 

“Maggie Sawyer,” Kara countered, the lilt in her voice making Maggie smile against common sense. “You’re right. I don’t _have_ to give you anything. But I’m going to give you _everything_.” And in that last phrase there was every sweet sin that Kara Danvers, unspeakably and duplicitiously innocent, was capable of intimating.

Maggie closed her eyes, briefly incapable of breathing. “I almost can’t believe this is happening to me,” she said, largely to herself.

“Nothing’s even happening right now,” Kara answered.

“Speak for yourself,” Maggie said. Her body seemed to think it was having phone sex.

Kara laughed again. “This is just the promise,” she said. “I’ll see you later for the delivery.” And then she was gone, back to work, with firm instructions to Maggie to get her own work done so the evening would be free.

Maggie looked at her phone for a long few minutes after Kara hung up. “Holy shit,” she breathed at last. She had thought she was going to be the one in charge, but it was becoming clear that she was not driving the train. She suspected that no one was driving the train. She knew she should be alarmed about this, but she was finding that she didn’t care. This was the part of the ride where everyone would just hang on, hope for the best, and enjoy the speed.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been reminded by a commenter that I did not credit or explain the origin of “aorosh,” which I meant to do. The Kryptonian language actually exists! The earliest version was created by an editor at DC Comics, Nelson Bridwell. He sounds like the nerdiest nerd who ever nerded and I wish I had known him. Sadly, his Kryptonian grammar and vocabulary has not survived. Post- _Crisis of Infinite Earths,_ DC started using a newly minted Kryptonian alphabet, but it was really just a font, not an actual language. Then, intrepid Superman scholar Darren Doyle came along and created his own Kryptonian language project, based as much as possible on the DC Superman canon. His website is [here](http://kryptonian.info). 
> 
> Doyle’s Kryptonian is a gendered language, which doesn’t really fit my reimagined gender-fluid Krypton, but whatever. The prefix “ao” indicates gender neutrality, and “rosh” is, indeed, derived from ehrosh, meaning “journey of life.” It seemed fitting.

Maggie usually got to Alex’s apartment in the evening before Alex did. She loved her job but she was a union member for a reason—the reason being that NCPD, like any enormous bureaucratic organization, would exploit anyone who didn’t resist it—and, absent emergencies, she left the precinct when her shift was over. Alex would almost inevitably get intrigued by one last little thing as she was on her way out, and forget to go home for an hour and a half.

So Maggie was used to a period of emptiness and silence after she arrived. Tonight, though, her habitual though always unnecessary knock elicited a “Hey, be right there!” and Kara opened the door.

Maggie stood for a moment in the hallway, flustered. Of course Kara was there, of course, and why hadn’t she thought about that? About being here, with Kara, alone? And what was so weird about that? 

Kara flashed her brilliant sunshine smile, the one where she looked like she was about to break into song, and said, “Come on in already!” So Maggie followed her in and then stood in the apartment, feeling idiotic.

“We have a job to do,” Kara announced. 

“Yeah? What?” Maggie asked, thinking in a confused way about getting dinner ready, a load of laundry ... She didn’t remember Alex asking for anything like that.

“This,” Kara said, stepping up to her. With that big innocent smile serving as a distraction, she had her mouth on Maggie’s before Maggie could catch up to what was happening. 

If she had been expecting it at all, Maggie might have expected Kara to be gentle and tentative. She wasn’t. She wasn’t rough either, but she was firm, and direct, and she wasted no time before bringing her tongue delicately to Maggie’s lips. Maggie opened to her and Kara slipped in, wet, warm, exploring her. 

Maggie slid her hand to the back of Kara’s neck and let herself fall into the simple, soft pleasure of the kiss. Kara was dancerly with her tongue, meeting and retreating, bringing back her lips when it got too deep, too much. Her fingertips danced up Maggie’s back, up her neck, into her hair.

They broke for air—well, Maggie needed air—and stood panting, cheek to cheek. “You’re going to get a crick in your neck,” Kara observed. Maggie was about to say something barbed, but then Kara bent her knees slightly, slid her hands to the backs of Maggie’s thighs, and lifted. 

Maggie’s arms went around Kara’s shoulders, her legs around her waist, and suddenly she was being supported, effortlessly, and her mouth was exactly where it needed to be. There might be some sort of short-person patronizing going on, but she decided she didn’t care that much if it meant that she had Kara’s lips, and tongue, and jawline, and earlobe, and neck.

Maggie stopped thinking about anything except melting into Kara. She noticed dimly that Kara was much, much more enthusiastic about kissing her than she would have predicted. Even after last night, she’d figured that she was, for Kara, an accessory of Alex’s; she expected interest, but she didn’t expect genuine passion, not yet. But there was no mistaking this. People lied in all sorts of ways, but they didn’t lie with their bodies unless they were a lot more cynical than Kara Danvers.

And Maggie was finding herself significantly more worked up than she might have expected. Maggie had, of course, found Kara attractive before last night. She loved women, and she had eyes and a pulse, so yes, she’d found Kara attractive. But she’d never gone _there_. Kara was her girlfriend’s sister, scrupulously, completely, unquestionably off limits. Even if she and Alex had been explicitly non-monogamous, that would have broken a simple common-sense rule. Maggie had so thoroughly walled off the possibility of even flirting with Kara that the idea of her as a sexual being was—for lack of a better word—alien.

Kara, though, was doing a pretty thorough job of changing her mind. Kara Zor-El, the person who played both virtuous hero Supergirl and ordinary awkward Kara Danvers, was proving herself to be neither of them. Proving it with utterly uninhibited exploration, unselfconscious hands and lips, unashamed desire.

Then Kara pulled back just enough to separate their mouths. “How does it feel to be doing this? You know, without ...?”

“Without Alex being here,” Maggie finished. She took a breath, taking in the scent of being so close to Kara. “It’s strange, I know. But I think—” She paused, trying to phrase it right. “I think if this is going to work, it has to work between us, without Alex.”

Kara stroked Maggie’s cheek with her own as she nodded. “It does.” She slid her mouth toward Maggie’s. She was enjoying Maggie’s skin as much as Maggie was enjoying Kara’s, and Maggie marveled again that she could ever have thought this woman prudish or inhibited.

Maggie was acutely aware of Kara’s hands strong under her thighs, spreading her legs open and pulling her into her hips. That sensation—her legs held apart, her cunt wide and aching but getting no pressure, no touch—was overwhelming and agonizing and wonderful. “God, Kara,” she whispered. “I need ... I need you ...” She was stumbling over her words. “I need you inside me, I need you to fuck me.”

Kara bit her way gently, so gently, up Maggie’s neck. “When Alex gets home,” she promised. “I want her with us.”

“We’ll video it,” Maggie gasped. “Show it to her later.”

Kara laughed and licked back down the column of bites. “So impatient.” She shifted her hands, and then she was holding Maggie up with one hand, a single upturned palm pressing directly into her swollen cunt. The other hand traced up Maggie’s side under her shirt. 

Maggie made a groaning, choking noise and rocked forward, back, forward, back, rubbing herself as best she could on Kara’s hand through the layers of her clothing, clutching herself to Kara with all the strength of her arms and legs. She knew that she was being utterly undignified, and she didn’t care.

She was hazily aware that Kara was unbuttoning her shirt with her free hand, pulling it out of her pants, then fumbling at the center of her back to loose her bra. Then Kara whispered the pads of her fingers over Maggie’s breast, and they both let out incoherent greedy sounds.

Maggie threw her head back, eyes closed, her whole weight grinding frantically on Kara’s implacable hand, making breathy grunts that were beginning to sound like _please, please, please._

“Oh, you,” Kara said into her ear, sounding satisfied, rubbing Maggie’s nipple with her thumb. “What am I going to do with you?”

Maggie gritted her teeth and got out, “You’re going to throw me on the bed, take my clothes off, and fuck me.”

Kara shook her head. “Not with my aorosh, not yet. I want Alex here for that.”

Even in the fog of her desire, Maggie found herself entranced by the way Kara said the word. _Aorosh_ : In Kara’s mouth, it sounded like exactly what it was, something that didn’t belong to this earth. 

“Fingers are fine,” she told Kara. “But _now_ , please.” She was aware that she was whining and it probably wasn’t very attractive, but Kara had begun to pulse her hand rhythmically, pushing into Maggie’s own half-involuntary movements, and it was so much, she was getting sore with how much she needed.

Then Kara walked up to the bed, taking the step with no apparent effort, and deposited Maggie on her back. She slid her hands down Maggie’s legs, lifting them, and pulled off her shoes; then she stood for a moment, grinning, holding Maggie’s ankles and keeping her legs open, as Maggie writhed.

“Don’t—just, fuck, don’t—” Maggie wailed. 

“Oh you poor baby,” Kara said. Then, with something more serious in her voice, she said, “Let me take care of you.”

Maggie closed her eyes, sure that Kara was going to take forever to get to the fucking; there would have to be a lot of slow romantic undressing and touching and she didn’t think she could stand it. Then she felt Kara lay her legs down, snap open the button of her pants, and start to pull. She opened her eyes again, not expecting to get what she wanted so quickly, and watched Kara peel off her pants and underwear and toss them behind her. 

“I know you’re needing,” Kara said, low and warm. “I know—oh.” She had parted Maggie’s knees and was staring at her hot and swollen cunt. “Oh, that’s beautiful.” She reached down and stroked her, vagina to clit and back, and Maggie groaned. Without another word, Kara slicked two fingers in Maggie’s juices and pushed them in.

“Yes,” Maggie breathed. “Perfect.”

“Tell me if it gets too hard.” Kara’s eyes were intense on hers.

Maggie couldn’t imagine it too hard—couldn’t imagine it hard _enough_ , at the moment—but she nodded. And then Kara put her other hand flat over Maggie’s abdomen just below her belly button, and she started to move. Maggie could hear the wet sounds of Kara’s fingers, in and out, in and out; she was so wet and so open that she could hardly feel Kara except at the deepest part of every stroke. “More,” she groaned out. “Another finger.” Kara obliged and finally, _finally_ it was enough, almost enough, Kara fucking her and fucking her, in and out and in and in. Maggie spread out her arms, grabbing the coverlet underneath her, losing herself in the sensation deep between her legs.

“Can you come like this?” Kara whispered.

Maggie shook her head. “Doesn’t matter,” she panted. “I just want this. Just this. Don’t stop.”

And Kara didn’t stop. She fucked Maggie with wonder in her eyes and a look of fascinated awe. She sped up when Maggie jogged her hips impatiently, slowed when she pulled back, pounded into her when she lifted up to meet her. 

“Want to be,” Maggie gasped, “on my front,” and Kara didn’t pull out, just let Maggie swing a knee over her arm and turn herself over to lie with her cheek against the bed and her legs draped over the edge, and then she pressed in close to hold Maggie up while she pistoned in and out, slick, sharp, powerful. Maggie felt tears dropping from her eyes; her mouth was open and she was probably drooling. She didn’t care. She couldn’t feel anything but the exquisite stab of Kara inside her, over and over.

Maggie loved being fucked. She loved it beyond the limits of most of her partners’ endurance, certainly beyond the limits of what she felt she could ask. But Kara had no limits. Kara didn’t slow, didn’t falter, didn’t weaken. If anything, the thrusts of her fingers were getting stronger. Maggie realized she was making groaning screaming noises, inarticulate but joyful, and every time Kara asked, “This okay? This still okay?” Maggie would shout a hoarse “Yes!”

Time changed. She had no idea how long it had been. The only measure of anything was the shift of sensation inside her, as the feeling of being fucked cycled from sweet to rough to full, as she clutched at Kara and relaxed and opened up for her.

Finally she squeezed her thighs together onto Kara’s hand. “Okay,” she breathed shakily. “Okay. That’s enough. For now.” She wanted it to go on forever but she wanted more later, too.

Kara laughed, stilling her hand, and Maggie could feel her breath tickle her lower back. “You sure?”

“For now,” Maggie repeated.

“Should I pull out?”

“Ah ...” Maggie had to think about it. “Yeah. Slow. Oh, god, yes, like that ...” Kara’s fingers slid free with a wet smack, and Maggie almost sobbed. She was tingling and throbbing and weak. 

“What do you need now?” Kara asked softly, as Maggie crawled slowly up onto the bed.

“You,” Maggie said, holding out a hand toward her. “Come up here and hold me, will you?”

“Of course,” Kara answered, moving up behind her and taking her in her arms. “Always,” she said, into Maggie’s hair.

Maggie lay clutching Kara’s shoulders, eyes half closed, letting her heartbeat slow. She’d only let herself go to this place a few times in her life, the place where she was nothing but a hungry wanting cunt taking everything she was given. It was disconcerting, how quickly she’d gone there with Kara; how quickly she’d trusted Kara with the secret of her appetite.

 

 

Alex found them lying there together half an hour later. She’d walked in to see Maggie’s work slacks slung over the back of the couch where Kara had thrown them, panties hanging out of the waistband, so she wasn’t completely surprised to see Maggie naked from the waist down with her socks still on, her shirt open and rumpled and her bra hiked up over her breasts. She was more surprised that Kara was still completely clothed, her hand protectively—possessively?—between Maggie’s legs. 

She was _shocked_ to see that Maggie was showing every sign of having been fucked until she was limp. That was a state Maggie had let Alex take her to only a couple of times. She seemed to have some sort of notion that it was too much work for Alex to take on.

Alex decided to be impressed rather than jealous. “So you got started without me _again_ ,” she chided, still standing near the couch. Kara turned and looked back at her over her shoulder and smiled. Maggie, her eyes closed, just gave an acquiescent grunt.

Dropping her bag and keys, Alex stalked up to the bed—the bed that she suddenly realized was elevated and centered in her apartment something like an altar—and crawled up to the heart of her life. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” Kara replied, and Maggie muttered something indistinct.

“Kara,” Alex said, her voice mock-accusatory, “I think you wrecked Maggie.”

Maggie smiled.

Kara pouted, “You’re only mad because you didn’t get to do it.”

“Well, yeah, of course,” Alex retorted. She had arrived on top of them, a hand placed on either side of them and a knee between Maggie’s legs. She leaned down and kissed Kara—it felt so good, just leaning over and kissing her, no drama, no guilt, no hesitation—and then nuzzled Maggie’s neck.

“I’m gonna be functional in a minute,” Maggie said dreamily. “Promise.”

“Mmm,” Alex hummed. “I kind of like you like this.” Hovering over them, she could scent the musk of Maggie’s sex, and she let herself get distracted. She push-walked back with her arms down Maggie’s body, kissing and nosing and nipping, till she arrived at Kara’s cupping hand. She used her chin to push Kara out of the way, and she felt Kara’s hand work into her hair a moment later.

Maggie’s sharp indrawn breath made her smile as she drew her face down into the valley between Maggie’s legs. Quick, sweet darts of her tongue, soft nips with her lips, and she could feel how thoroughly Maggie had given herself.

Alex buried herself in Maggie, stroking her with her tongue, pushing into her with her mouth and chin and jaw. She felt a rush next to them and, glancing up, saw that Kara was suddenly naked. “Show-off,” she said into Maggie’s clit, and Maggie groaned. 

“Just efficient,” Kara answered, and then Alex felt the whirl around her body that meant Kara was taking care of her. 

“Should I take her shirt off too?” Kara mused, behind Alex now and talking into the back of her neck.

“You should,” Alex nodded.

Another quick feeling of air and lightness all around, and Alex looked up at Maggie naked, her arms thrown out and her eyelids heavy but open.

“So the two of you are finished?” Alex inquired, letting a little disappointment color her tone. She wanted them to enjoy each other, she did. But she didn’t think it was wrong of her to be sad to miss each aching moment. 

“Oh no,” Kara said. “Not even. We saved some really good stuff for you.”

Alex laughed; she couldn’t help it. Kara sounded as if she’d selflessly set aside a whole box of donuts.

Maggie laughed too, clearly hearing the same thing. She was starting to be a little more alert. “There was kind of a lot of fucking, which you probably guessed, but we waited on the main event,” she said conspiritorially. “I haven’t learned the joys of the aorosh yet.”

“Oh my,” Alex said with exaggerated astonishment. She reached forward and dragged her lower lip over Maggie—her opening, her inner lips, her clit. She was rewarded with a long sigh and a slow roll of the hips. 

“You know I’ve never done this with anyone but you,” Kara whispered.

“I know,” Alex murmured, still nosing gently into Maggie.

“I really—” Kara took a deep breath. “Maggie. Please. Can I, please?”

“Yes,” Maggie said. “Yes, Kara. Please.”

There was a remarkably smooth shift as they all rolled over each other into the places they wanted to be: Kara lying between Maggie’s open legs, Alex pressed up against them to the side. 

Alex watched Maggie and Kara kiss the way they’d just learned to, sloppy and wet and hungry; and as Kara pushed up to settle on top of Maggie, Alex warned, “Condom.”

Both Maggie and Kara groaned impatiently, and Alex reached across them into the drawer. “It’s a good thing there are three of us,” she muttered. “You guys would have made some serious trouble on your own, wouldn’t you.”

Neither of them bothered to deny it. Kara sat back on her heels, proud above Maggie, letting her aorosh extend. She sighed and closed her eyes as Alex rolled on the condom, and then looked down at Maggie with fierce want. She put a hand under each of Maggie’s thighs and spread them.

Maggie made an inarticulate needy noise.

Kara took her aorosh in one hand and lowered herself gently, gently onto Maggie, searching for her entrance; Maggie pushed her hips up, presenting herself as openly as she could. 

Alex watched hypnotized as Kara found Maggie’s vagina with the tip of her aorosh and slowly pushed in. Alex could almost feel it in her own body, the thick stretch as Kara entered, the soft and greedy taking of Maggie’s cunt. She saw Maggie’s eyes flutter, heard Kara’s quiet moan, and she knew just what Maggie was feeling: something only she, of all other women on Earth, had ever felt.

As Kara sank into her, Maggie’s first thought was, _Sort of like a dildo. Not so different._ And then, as Kara pressed into her and her aorosh filled her, she realized how fantastically different it was. Kara moved inside her, pushing in a slow beat against her ridges of muscle and nerves, but she was also squeezed against the base of Maggie’s clit, rocking only enough to stimulate her.

“Oh my god,” Maggie breathed.

“Rao,” Kara corrected, half growling and half laughing.

Maggie let her eyes close again, and she focused on this new sensation. It was like being fucked—it _was_ being fucked—but it was like no fucking she’d ever had. She was full the way a cock filled her, but it pushed and twisted and rubbed the way fingers did. And then—

“Ah!” she exclaimed. “Is it getting bigger? Inside me?”

Kara was breathing deeply and evenly, as if she were focusing very, very intently. “Sort of,” she answered. “Maybe? It’s hard for me to know exactly but, yes, I think I swell up a little.”

Alex slipped her left hand between Maggie and Kara, reaching for Maggie’s clit. She pressed and circled with two fingers when she found it, and she heard Maggie’s gasp. 

Kara breathed, “Move up a little, Alex. On your belly. I want to be in you too.” 

Alex bit Maggie’s shoulder gently and then obeyed, shifting so that she lay next to Maggie, her face to the mattress and her legs parted, in the perfect position for Kara to push two strong fingers into her. She gasped as she felt Kara deep in her cunt, and she lifted her hips into the power of Kara’s thrust. Her fingers stuttered on Maggie’s clit but she quickly recovered the rhythm.

There was a gentle symphony in the room: Maggie’s throaty cries as Kara’s aorosh stroked inside her, Alex’s staccato groans pushing out _huh, huh, huh_ with every pump of Kara’s fingers, the slick smack of wet flesh as Kara fucked them both.

And Kara—aorosh deep in one lover, fingers deep in the other: If she had had one perfect moment since she had come to this planet, this was it.


	9. Chapter 9

When Maggie came, she came in a way she never had before: completely present in her body, completely focused on the physical sensations she was experiencing, feeling no anxiety over whether she was pleasing anyone else. It was an orgasm that built dark and hot within her where Kara’s aorosh pressed and swelled into the tenderest place in her body, pushed forward by the liquid pleasure of Alex’s fingers moving slow and strong on her clit. When her climax broke over her, she cried out with the joy of it, and also with the sorrow of having this exquisite feeling come to an end. Neither Kara nor Alex let up in their patient, rhythmic attentions, murmuring encouragement to each other, and she felt wave after smaller wave ripple through her, cunt outward, until finally it was too much and she clutched with her legs and whispered, “Still, please, stay still.” They held her then and kissed the tears from her cheeks, and only then did she realize that she was crying.

She sobbed again when Kara softened and pulled out, though she knew she would be sore later. Alex moved her hand down and held her, cupping her swollen and overheated sex with her fingers, and it was almost enough. 

“I’ve never felt like that,” she whispered when she could form words again. “Like this.” 

“Like how?” Alex asked into her shoulder, and Kara added an inquiring nuzzle to her cheek.

“Like ...” Maggie searched for the words. “Safe,” she finally said. “I knew you were going to take care of me, no matter what I needed.”

Both of the heads against her nodded. “We are,” Kara murmured, and Alex echoed her: “We are.”

 

 

Buried deep in Kara’s body, Maggie paused and raked her nails down Kara’s smoothly muscled back. Kara, on her elbows and knees with her hair spread messily out over the bed, gave a low whimper and pushed back at Maggie just a tiny bit.

Grinning, Maggie slapped Kara’s flank. “Don’t get impatient, Danvers,” she ordered. 

“What are you talking about?” Alex said from behind her, where she knelt with her thighs on either side of Maggie’s, Maggie’s ass nestled against Alex’s pelvis. “I’m totally following your lead.”

“The _other_ Danvers,” Maggie said.

“Oh. Right,” Alex said, into the back of Maggie’s neck, and adjusted her grip on Maggie’s shoulders.

Maggie launched herself, driving her hips forward with the power of her legs, aided by Alex’s weight. Kara, receiving the force of this combined effort, grunted incoherent pleasure. 

Maggie backed out slowly, the cock between them making a soft sucking sound, the straps of the harness biting into her thighs, and then thrust forward again, Alex with her. They punched another guttural noise from Kara. 

Maggie brought her hips back again, slowly, slowly, and let Alex time the next thrust. Perfect: The sound from Kara’s throat this time was half moan and half cry. 

“You sound so pretty,” Maggie murmured. “You need us so bad, don’t you,” and Kara groaned low and long as Maggie drew the cock out of her again, rocking her body back into Alex. 

Again, hard, and again and again, and Kara’s voice pitched up still more. Maggie and Alex were starting to move like one heavy, brutal beast, and Kara, solid beneath them, mewled and cried out and grunted and groaned. 

Maggie’s hips and thighs were starting to ache with the effort. She was beginning to see how Alex could have done this over and over again and been able to think of it as not being sex. It was work. 

“I need ... I _need_ ...” Kara panted, a “need” pushed out at the bottom of each stroke. 

“What, baby,” Maggie breathed.

“On my ... _oh_ ... Alex, can you reach me?” 

Alex fumbled forward. “Not quite,” she said. “Mags?”

Maggie had Kara by the hips, pulling her back with every lunge forward. “My hands are full,” she said, and then ordered, “Do it yourself, Kara. Touch yourself. Take care of yourself. _Now_.”

Kara braced one forearm over her head, and her other hand disappeared beneath her. “Oh Rao,” she said, and repeated it with every thrust Maggie gave her. “Rao. Rao. _Rao_.”

“Faster,” Alex said into Maggie’s ear, and they picked up the pace; the sound of their fucking sped up until it was a continuous wet fury. Just as Maggie was starting to think that her legs and lungs were going to give out, Kara pushed her hips back abruptly, held herself there against Maggie and Alex’s onslaught, and gave a great rough shout.

Maggie found that she couldn’t pull back again, the cock clamped in Kara’s clenching cunt, and she fell gracelessly forward over Kara’s back. Alex draped herself over Maggie, and the three of them lay a moment, panting, until they all started to laugh.

They rolled apart, Maggie pulling carefully out. “That was amazing,” Kara said at last. “Amazing.”

Maggie would have agreed if she’d been able to speak. She was only able to produce an inarticulate happy noise.

Alex pushed up on one elbow and surveyed the other two. Maggie had landed between them on her back; Kara had collapsed on her belly with her head turned toward them, but her eyes were closed. Alex felt a swell of love and reached over Maggie, nestling her head into Maggie’s shoulder while she stroked Kara’s back with a flat hand.

“There are,” Maggie said after a few moments, “so many incredibly fabulous ways we can fuck each other.”

Alex laughed into her shoulder. “Is that what you’re lying here thinking about?”

“Well, yes, of course,” Maggie replied.

“Me too!” Kara exclaimed.

“To be honest,” Alex admitted, “so was I.”

They all fell silent then, enjoying the touch of each other’s skin and the panoramas unfolding in their imaginations.

“This can’t all be sex, you know,” Maggie said drowsily a few minutes later. 

“Really? So far so good,” Alex demurred.

Maggie had to smile into the pillow, but she followed with, “I mean it, Danvers. Both of you. We’re all agreed that we want this long term, right?” 

“Rest of my life,” Alex said, as drowsy as Maggie was, but the certainty in her voice was unmistakable and it made Maggie need suddenly to blink and swallow. 

After the briefest of pauses to get herself together, Maggie went on, “So at some point we have to do things that aren’t in bed.” 

Kara said, “We could have sex in the kitchen.” 

“Not really what I was aiming for,” Maggie answered. “But yes. We could definitely do that.”

Kara stirred and rolled onto her side, facing Maggie and Alex fully, and propped her head up on her hand. “Maggie,” she said, “I know you’re worried.”

“I’m not worried,” Maggie protested.

“Yes, you are,” Kara said calmly. “Of course you are. This isn’t something people here do and we all know it. It’s going to be weird sometimes. Who are we going to tell? Who aren’t we going to tell? How do we behave together in public? If we do have kids, how do we sort out the legal relationships? What do we call each other?”

Maggie was stunned silent. She had honestly believed she was the only one already considering the enormous decisions before them, to say nothing the hundreds of tiny decisions they would be making every day from now on.

“Listen, though,” Kara went on earnestly. “This is going to be hard for you to believe, but this is one form of relationship that I actually know more about than you do. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived in it. It’s my _normal_ , Maggie.”

Alex added from the other side of her, “We’ll figure it out, Mags.”

Maggie lay quiet for a moment, her tired brain boiling. At last she burst out, “How?”

Both the Danverses laughed at her. Gently, sleepily, but they definitely laughed at her.

“Oh, Maggie,” Alex said at her shoulder.

“You’re sweet,” Kara chimed in, curling in to her other shoulder and looping an arm around her waist.

“How did we do it so far?” Alex asked.

“We ...” Maggie wasn’t precisely sure.

“We loved each other,” Kara said with certainty. “And we talked a lot.”

“I hated that part,” Alex muttered.

“I liked it,” Kara said. “And you liked it too, you just aren’t used to it.”

Alex made a noncommittal noise.

Maggie, overwhelmed suddenly with exhaustion, closed her eyes. She was going to have to get used to the fact that she was never quite going to be able to get used to anything ever again. She was familiar with the sensation of being surprised by discovering something new about a person she thought she knew intimately; it happened in every long-term partnership, romantic and not. But living between the Danvers sisters was going to be like getting whacked in the back of the head out of the blue every so often for the rest of her life.


	10. Chapter 10

“Maggie is completely and irrationally furious with me,” Alex told Kara. “She told me that if I put a pint of ice cream back in the freezer with two tablespoons left in it, I was basically telling her that I don’t give a shit about her.”

“Doesn’t she have that internal review coming up?” Kara replied, frowning. “To say nothing of the string of sexual assaults that they don’t even have a suspect for. _And_ she’s about to get her period.”

“I can’t believe you’re more on top of Maggie’s menstrual cycle than she is. How do you always know?”

Kara hesitated. “Do you actually want the answer to that?”

“Since it probably has to do with either x-ray vision or your supersensitive sense of smell, no, I don’t. But thanks. It’s good to know that this really isn’t about me.”

“Well.” Kara paused. “She also does really hate it when you put a pint of ice cream back in the freezer with two tablespoons of ice cream in it.”

“No one in her right mind wants more than two tablespoons of vegan ice cream anyway,” Alex grumbled.

 

 

Their road together wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t rocky, either, not more than any other relationship, but the bumps were magnified. A misunderstanding, a slight, an oversight, a badly worded text, a sharp comment after a long day—an extra person’s involvement didn’t just add to but multiplied the emotional effects. Three different approaches to conflict and resolution equaled many messy combinations of fury, bewilderment, shame, guilt, resentment, gall, self-pity, self-righteousness.

Maggie fought. She wasn’t cantankerous by nature, but she had grown up the fifth of seven siblings, and in her house of course you yelled when you were mad—how else would anyone hear you? It’s not as if you didn’t love your brother just because you screamed that you hated him. 

On top of that, she’d been brown-skinned in a white-skinned town, a tomboy and, later, a dyke in a rigidly gendered world. In Maggie’s experience, you had your fists up all the time or somebody was going to lay you out. She was learning, as an adult, that she didn’t always have to hit back and hit harder, but she was still learning. She exploded, and was invariably surprised to discover that the objects of the explosion didn’t share her sense that the whole thing was over once the ash settled.

Alex smoldered. Something would irritate or annoy or hurt her, and she would cover it with indifference, but it would fester. She’d rarely, if ever, blow up; instead, that ever-increasing boil would spur her to sarcasm and spite. She was usually only dimly aware of the metastasizing sore spot herself, and it was hard for her lovers to perceive anything other than distant, lurking anger from her until she launched an arrow from the quiver of the nigh-unforgivable. 

Kara endured. She was never wholly sure whether the injuries she felt were justified or invented—misinterpretations of culturally-specific gestures that she’d never fully absorbed, or expectations shaped by a culture that no longer existed. When in doubt, she put her head down and forged forward. By the time she was able to formulate and assert her own needs, it could be long past the moment when the solution was simple.

The saving grace in all of this was, perhaps ironically, that there was an additional eye to measure the damage and triage the wounded at the end of every skirmish. When Maggie erupted and Kara wanted to sink into the floor, Alex was there to reassure her that no, it was not the end of the world, Maggie loved her, she always lit herself on fire and she always calmed down. When Alex sank a bitter, poisoned barb into Maggie’s softest insecurity, Kara would defend them from each other, could remind Maggie that Alex hurt more from the impact than Maggie did.

 

 

Alex was attempting to read a policy paper from a think tank on the advisability of a fast-track naturalization process for aliens; the prose was dense and academic, but she was starting to think that the extremely conservative author was suggesting that there was economic advantage in being the country most welcoming of extraterrestrial talent, which was a little exciting. It was hard to concentrate, though, since Maggie seemed to be intent on making as much noise as she could in the kitchen. 

Every drawer slammed, every pan rattled. Maggie even chopped more loudly than usual. Finally she barked, “Do you know what’s up with Kara?”

Alex frowned, her eyes still on the screen of her tablet. “There’s something up with Kara?”

Maggie banged the iron skillet onto the stove. “How the fuck would I know? It’s not like she’d tell me.”

Alex looked up, startled, and took in the fierce glare Maggie leveled at the oil heating in the pan and the raw hurt just below it. “Ohh-kay,” she said, putting the tablet down. “How about you tell me what actually happened.”

“I—” Maggie started, and stopped. “She—” and stopped again. She took a deep breath and said rapidly, “The thing is, she’s acting like she’s fine. And if I didn’t know her so well, I’d think she was fine. So maybe she really is fine, and I don’t know her as well as I think I do, and I’m making something up where there’s nothing.”

Alex nodded. Kara was much harder to read than she seemed to be. Most of the time she was really feeling the earnest sweetness that she projected, and when she wasn’t, she was expert at projecting it anyway. 

“We were talking about Martin Raberman,” Maggie went on. Alex nodded again; she hadn’t been involved with that arrest but Maggie and Kara had both talked to her about it. “She just—avoided saying anything, really. Then I offered her the emergency chips from my bottom desk drawer and she told me she wasn’t hungry.” She dumped a prep bowl full of chopped onions into the oil, raising a satisfying hiss. When the angry sound of the evaporation died back, she said, “It’s not much, you know? But it just seems ... wrong. She ought to have had something to say about Raberman, even if it’s the same thing she says about every bad actor we bag.” She took another bowl, this one with the minced garlic, and tossed it in on top of the onions. Grabbing a wooden spoon and stirring, she added, “And not hungry? That’s just weird.”

“I think you should trust your instincts on this, but to find out what’s really going on, you’re going to have to ask her,” Alex said after a moment of consideration. 

Maggie slid her eyes over at Alex, conveying exasperation without a word.

“I know,” Alex held up her hands, “it isn’t the most scintillating advice, but I can’t tell you what’s up. I don’t know, for one thing. And it would be more useful in the long run for you to figure out how to talk to her yourself.”

“Do you think I haven’t tried?” Now the hurt was the top note. “She isn’t gonna tell me if things aren’t completely peachy. The number of people who she trusts enough to see her as anything other than ‘I’m one hundred percent A-OK jim dandy fine’ is one, and that’s you.”

Alex was quiet for a long moment. “It took her years to raise that number from zero,” she said at last. “She only did because I kept not going anywhere. You have to stick with her.”

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Maggie groused.

 

 

“What makes you think I’m not totally fine? Why wouldn’t I be fine?” Kara wouldn’t quite meet Maggie’s eyes.

It was a day later, and Maggie had shown up at Kara’s apartment without warning and walked in, not giving her time to come up with a polite way of putting her off. “I think it’s Raberman. I think that case is still bugging you.”

Martin Raberman was accused of following two teenage girls onto and then off a bus, trailing them for blocks, and then, in a deserted stretch of street, assaulting them with a piece of pipe. One—the alien—had been so badly beaten that, weeks later, she had no memory of the incident. Her human friend, who’d gotten out of it with a broken forearm, had picked Raberman out of a lineup. 

“I don’t think he did it,” Kara said abruptly. She looked up at Maggie, clearly ready for an argument.

Maggie gave a sharp nod. “Yeah. I don’t think so either.”

Kara jerked her head, obviously startled. “What?”

Maggie shrugged. “I think you’re right. I think he’s the wrong guy.”

Kara stared at her, open-mouthed. “But ... but ...” she sputtered, confused. “Why did you arrest him, then?”

“When we arrested him,” Maggie said, “I thought he was probably the right guy. Fit the description, fit the profile, in the right area at the right time, record of violence—everything fit. And then, of course, one of the victims picked him out of the lineup.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t until later that it started to feel wrong. Like, he’s got a history of violent incidents, but only toward other men, and only in situations where everybody had been drinking. He gets in bar fights, he doesn’t stalk teenage girls.” She spread her hands. “And eyewitnesses are unreliable. Worse than nothing, most of the time.”

“Why is he still in custody, then?” Kara sounded outraged.

“It’s not my call anymore,” Maggie said. “I put him in the system, so now he’s in the system, and I can’t just decide to let him go.”

“Somebody has to be able to.” Kara looked petulant.

Maggie shook her head. “I’m the cop, not the prosecutor. I can tell the prosecutor what I think, which I will, and they might agree with me and drop the charges. They might not.”

“That isn’t _fair_.”

“It’s as fair as it gets.” Maggie put a hand to Kara’s cheek, silently blessing the outrage that Kara was unable to conceal. “Look, the thing is, he’s got an attorney. He’s going to get a trial, if it has to go that far, and if I get on the stand, I’m going to tell the truth.” Maggie moved her hand to grip Kara’s shoulder, and the expression on her face was fierce. “If I fuck up, and I do fuck up because everyone fucks up once in a while, the guy gets a chance to make things right. He’s going to get an attorney, he’s going to get his day in court, he gets to challenge the evidence against him before anything irrevocable happens. It’s a long way from perfect. You know as well as I do” ( _not quite as well,_ Maggie thought, perfectly and personally aware of the ugly realities that blonde white women don’t face) “that some people get a fair shake in the system and some don’t, but it’s a lot better than—than Guardian fucking up and breaking the wrong guy’s jaw.”

Kara digested this, and said, “Or Supergirl.”

Maggie sighed. “Or Supergirl. That’s the difference between being a superhero and being a cop, and that’s the reason I became a cop.” 

Kara looked thoughtful but troubled. “Do you think,” she said at last, “that what I do is wrong?”

Maggie let herself breathe for a moment before she answered that one. “I think,” she said at last, “that the law and the courts don’t work in reality the way that they work ideally. In some ways, you’re closer to ideal than NCPD or the criminal justice system are ever gonna be, because you’re—because you’re you.” She gave Kara a lopsided smile. “But you’re one person. I’m never gonna trust justice to one person, no matter how wonderful she is.”

Kara nodded, and a small smile came to her face. “Not even you?”

“Hell, especially not me.” Maggie impetuously took a quick step closer to Kara and put her arms around her. “I’m not telling you that what you do isn’t great. It _is_ great. _You_ are great.”

Kara returned the hug, burying her face in Maggie’s hair. After a moment she said, muffled, “You’re going to have to keep me honest.”

“Likewise,” Maggie said, pulling back just enough to look into Kara’s eyes and smile. “El mayarah, right?”

Kara couldn’t keep herself from smiling. “El mayarah,” she agreed.

That night Alex came home carrying a gallon of Rocky Road and a bag of chipotle kale chips to apologize for staying in the lab till after nine, to find Maggie lying on her stomach between Kara’s legs conducting experiments of her own.

“Did you know about this?” Maggie greeted her, with a look of wild amazement. She was stroking the concentric ridges at the opening of Kara’s vagina—cloaca?— _entrance_ with one delicate finger. 

Alex dropped the ice cream and chips and slid in behind Maggie, sinking her teeth into the back of her neck with her eyes on Maggie’s finger, slipping up to where Kara was biting her lip and gripping the reinforced Kevlar rope that they’d attached to the headboard to give her something she could clutch at without ripping apart. “I think she likes it,” Alex murmured into Maggie’s ear.

“That’s one word for it,” Maggie responded, distracted. She leaned forward and added her tongue, and Kara gave out a sound that was partway between a groan and a shout.

“Remind me to look into better soundproofing,” Alex muttered.

“Huh?” Maggie wasn’t really listening. “I’ve had her here for almost an hour,” she said, the devilish smile evident in her voice. “This part of her—you didn’t _tell_ me, Alex.”

Alex reached around Maggie’s shoulder to add her own finger to the stimulation of the feathery ridges. “Mmm. Isn’t it better to find it on your own?”

Maggie didn’t answer; her mouth was occupied.

Alex leaned forward into Maggie’s body and put her lips at Maggie’s ear. “Imagine,” she said, low and sensual, “that everything between your legs was your clit. Outside. Inside.” Maggie gave an incoherent moan muffled by what she was doing to Kara, and Kara made a noise that defied description. Alex moved her hand up, to somewhere near Maggie’s nose, and put her thumb on the swollen bud that was the very tip of Kara’s aorosh. 

The ragged scream Kara gave would have terrified them both if they hadn’t heard it before, and known that it presaged an absolutely heroic orgasm.

When they were all back on the bed, laughing or crying or some combination of the two, Alex gathered them both in her arms. “Everything okay?” she asked. 

Maggie and Kara both knew what she was asking about. “Mmm-hmm,” Maggie answered, already drowsy.

“We’re fine,” Kara assured Alex, stroking her hair out of her face. “We talked. And then we—” She waved her hand to indicate the pile of sweaty limbs. 

“Fucked,” Alex supplied.

“That,” Kara nodded.

“I think we should suggest this method of conflict resolution to NATO,” Maggie said indistinctly, into the side of Kara’s breast.

“Oh Rao, the ice cream’s melting!” Kara yelled, and bolted from the bed.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, an update (a two-chapter update!) this quick is likely to alarm and upset some of you. Never fear, I’ll resume my glacial pace after today.

For all of the importance they all placed on the time the three of them spent together, some of the most important moments would still happen between just two of them. That was inevitable; the three of them couldn’t always be together, even if they’d wanted such a thing. And, of course, some subjects needed to be aired first along one particular axis of their relationship.

Several months after the first night they had all been together, Alex and Maggie were having an evening by themselves as Kara saw some awful musical comedy with Winn. It afforded an opportunity for a conversation—a Conversation, the kind with deep implications and deeper risks. Alex knew it was something she had to do; it was the only way forward, but she was keenly aware that it could also ( _would_ also) upset the comfortable equilibrium the three of them had found.

Alex scrutinized the ceiling over the bed with intense focus as she tried to formulate the best way to bring up the thoroughly life-altering subject she needed to talk about. Finally she simply blurted, “We haven’t talked about kids.”

“We aren’t _ready_ to talk about kids.” Maggie was doing crunches on the floor next to the bed.

“Yeah,” Alex said, in a tone of voice that meant the opposite. “Except, there’s some time pressure we haven’t discussed.”

Maggie paused and sat up all the way. “Time pressure? You’re thirty. I’m thirty-two. We’ve certainly got a couple of years before our eggs start drying out or whatever.”

Alex shifted uncomfortably. “If we were going to have one kid, or two, sure.”

Maggie stared at her and said slowly, “That sure sounds as if you’re planning to have a lot more than two kids.”

Alex sighed. “I frankly never thought I’d even want one. But if we’re having children with Kara—” She stopped, and Maggie realized with some concern that she was choked up.

“Are you feeling pressure from Kara about kids? Alex,” Maggie said, “having children is something you’ve got to be just as ready for as she is. And me too. You can’t half-ass it.”

“Kara would never, ever put any pressure on me about this. Not on either of us. But I know how much it would mean to her. To have a family again? A future?” 

“She has a future with or without you having babies.” Stubborn lines appeared between Maggie’s eyebrows; she obviously resented the idea of having their timeline dictated by Kara’s supposed needs.

“Not really.” 

Maggie frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Kara came to this world alone, and someday she’ll be alone again, unless she has other Kryptonians here with her.”

Maggie shook her head, puzzled. 

Alex tried to be gentle. “Kara heals almost instantly because of the way our sun’s radiation affects her cell structure, but that’s only part of what her physiology entails. She doesn’t experience cellular degradation.” Maggie still looked blank. “She’s effectively immortal, Maggie.”

Realization began to dawn on Maggie’s face.

“Do you understand? She matured from a child to an adult, but she’s not going to age, not at a rate that we could detect. When we’re old and decrepit, she’s going to be pretty much exactly as she is now. And that means—”

“That means that she’s going to lose everyone she loves, again.” The horror on Maggie’s face was hard to look at.

Alex nodded, remembering how it had hit her when she’d first figured it out. “Kara’s so positive that it’s easy to forget that she’s also haunted. And the way she fights? She isn’t reckless because she’s thoughtless. She’s reckless because whether she’d admit it or not, there’s a big part of her that wants to die.” Alex made a helpless gesture. “For God’s sake, she locked herself into the Fortress of Solitude with an interdimensional clown and initiated a self-destruct. She would have killed herself to get rid of him, and all he was doing was _annoying_ her.

“She didn’t do that just because she felt responsible to the rest of the world. She did it because it was an excusable way for the pain to end.” 

Maggie winced.

“So yes. It might sound retrograde and unfeminist and just bizarre coming out of my mouth, but I want to give her children, if I can.” 

Maggie sat for a moment staring into space. Then she rolled back down and started doing crunches again. She said, between reps, “You’re right. We have logistics to discuss.”

Alex couldn’t help the ridiculously fond smile that took over her face. “Sawyer. Have I mentioned that I love you?”

“Once or twice,” Maggie said, smiling her own fond smile, catching Alex’s eye as she came to the top of her crunch. 

“So,” Alex went on, making a list out loud, “we have to think about money, obviously. A different apartment at some point. Arranging leave from the DEO, and getting someone to cover my projects. Security, once the baby’s born. Child care—wow, that might be a nightmare. We can’t just hand a half-Kryptonian off to a babysitter and say, ‘By the way, call us if she starts shooting lasers out of her eyes or floating out of her crib.’ ” Maggie laughed. Alex added, as if off-handedly, “Physical risks of the pregnancy. I should get an assessment from the DEO med staff.”

Maggie stopped again, fixing Alex with a deadly stare. Alex sighed; her attempt to downplay that last bit hadn’t worked very well. 

This time Maggie clambered to her feet and flopped next to Alex on the bed. “Babe.”

“Yes.”

“You keep saying I, I, I. This is _we_. You understand that?”

“Of course,” Alex said, turning to Maggie, putting a hand on her cheek. “I know you’ll be there for me. For the baby too, and for Kara. I’m not—”

Maggie interrupted her, shaking her head. “Not just that, babe. I’m not letting you take any risks that I’m not taking too.” Alex cocked her head, not fully comprehending what Maggie had just said. “If you’re gonna put your life on the line to have Kara’s baby, then so am I.”

Alex protested, “Maggie, that’s ridiculous.”

“No it’s not,” Maggie retorted, a little wounded. 

Alex scowled. “You’re planning to get pregnant just because I’m going to get pregnant? It _is_ ridiculous. I’m not talking about getting the new iPhone. I’m not even talking about facing danger together. We do that all the time. But _this_ , at the end of this there’s going to be a baby, Maggie, a person we’re responsible for forever.” 

Maggie suddenly swung over, holding Alex down with her body, pinning her shoulders to the bed. She looked into Alex’s eyes fiercely. “You think I haven’t thought about this? I think about it every time she fucks me, Alex.” 

Alex grabbed Maggie’s hips, instinctively pulling her close, searching her face. 

“It’s not a sacrifice, Al. It’s an _opportunity_.” Maggie’s gaze was earnest. “I never imagined I’d have this. The first thing that goes out the window when you realize you’re a lesbian is the connection between sex and procreation. And it’s okay, it’s fine—most straight people aren’t having sex to make babies either—but it’s a loss, right? Don’t pretend it isn’t.”

Alex actually hadn’t thought about it much. She’d been too overwhelmed with everything else, too astonished by the fact that for the first time in her life she could openly enjoy a connection between sex and _feelings_. 

“God, Alex, I get to have my lover’s baby. _We_ get to have her _babies_. This is ...” She swallowed. “This is a fantasy come true, sweetheart, you understand that?”

Alex, dumbfounded, nodded. 

“Besides,” Maggie added, her grin reemerging, “if we’re going to repopulate the House of El we’re both gonna have to work at it. Otherwise you’re going to be constantly pregnant for the rest of your life.” She lowered herself to Alex and kissed her; Alex kissed her back, and they lost themselves to everything but the way their mouths and their bodies moved together. 

They made love feverishly, biting and rubbing and scratching and humping, plowing each other, the air full of slapping skin, whines and grunts, proving the fertility of what they had between them right there. When they lay at last exhausted, fucked out, they held each other while the sweat dried and murmured to each other softly. Maggie rolled to the side and turned off the light.

Out of the dark, Alex’s voice came, authoritative but with an undercurrent of alarm. “We’re going to need a _much_ bigger apartment.”

 

 

Dr. Hamilton pushed back her chair, letting herself roll over the floor toward Alex with a smile on her face. “Dr. Danvers. It’s nice to see you by appointment and not in an emergency, for a change.”

Alex was well aware that she required triage more often than routine wellness, and she was sufficiently embarrassed by this that she didn’t correct Dr. Hamilton with her usual “Dr. Danvers is my mother, thanks.”

Dr. Hamilton went on, “What can I do for you today?”

Alex tried not to take a deep breath. She had decided that she was simply going to treat what she had to ask as if it were perfectly ordinary and uncontroversial. Which it was. Definitely. “I have some questions about ... Kara, actually.”

Dr. Hamilton frowned slightly. “I can’t discuss another patient’s treatment or medical history with you, Alex, even if she is your sister.”

“Are you worried about HIPAA?” Alex said caustically. “Because given that we all work for a black-ops organization that doesn’t officially exist, nobody is likely to run to the state medical board with a complaint.”

Dr. Hamilton raised an eyebrow. “I’m worried about ethics. I have some, you know.”

Alex deflated a bit. Despite her internal insistence that she would be unselfconscious and forthright, she was already acting defensive. “Sorry,” she muttered. “I don’t think it’ll be a problem, really. I’m only concerned with Kara’s personal medical profile as it might affect me.”

The quizzical narrowing of Dr. Hamilton’s eyes was her only reaction, but it asked the question plainly enough: _And how might Kara’s history affect you?_

Alex finally took that deep breath. “I assume you are familiar with Kara’s biology. Reproductive biology.” She was still stumbling a little and she could feel her cheeks heating, but she forced her features to be neutral. “I’m not sure whether you know that Kara can, has, in fact, impregnated a human female.”

Dr. Hamilton nodded slowly, and her features dropped into a mask of careful expressionlessness as well. “I am aware of that, yes. Kara and I have discussed that as part of her medical history, and we have done some limited lab work to try to understand how human and Kryptonian cross-fertilization works.”

Alex set her chin and tried to keep her voice steady. “Kara probably didn’t tell you that the woman she got pregnant was me.” 

Dr. Hamilton’s expression, impressively, didn’t change. “She did not, no.” After the barest hesitation, she said, “She did tell me that the pregnancy was terminated.”

Alex nodded and tried to be detached as she said, “We didn’t have any information about the viability of the ...” She tripped but recovered. “Embryo. And the risks that the pregnancy might pose.”

Dr. Hamilton nodded. “That was one of the questions that Kara wanted to address.”

Alex looked at a spot between Dr. Hamilton’s eyes. It was a trick she’d learned doing interrogations: The person she was observing wouldn’t be able to tell that she wasn’t looking directly into their eyes, but she didn’t have to look directly into their eyes. “We are considering attempting to conceive again. But, naturally, we’d—I’d—like to have more of a sense of what risks I might be taking.”

“Of course,” Dr. Hamilton said, brisk and professional. “I will certainly give you all the information I can, though, as I said, our lab tests have been limited.” Before Alex could ask, she added, “Neither Kara nor I was comfortable with the idea of creating potentially viable embryos as a consequence of our experimentation. Ethically, but also practically. Once those embryos existed, there would always be the possibility that they could be misappropriated by some person or organization whose motives in bringing to life a half-Kryptonian would be—questionable, at best.”

Alex suppressed a shudder. 

“We have a fair amount of information about Kryptonian biology from our studies of Kara— _your_ studies, of course, primarily. And we know something of Kryptonian fetal development from the Alura AI and from Kal-El’s records at the Fortress. It’s the interaction of Kryptonian and human that raises all the questions.” Dr. Hamilton turned to her computer and opened some files, then tilted the monitor so that Alex could see. “Kara and I have collaborated on a few experiments in which we’ve observed the behavior of her gametes with human sperm and ova. Kryptonian sex cells—or Kara’s, at least—appear to render sperm cells inert, but their behavior toward human ova is quite extraordinary.”

“Extraordinary how?” Alex asked.

“Aggressive,” Dr. Hamilton told her. “And potent. Watch the video. I’m sure you’ve seen footage of human conception, yes?” Alex had her eyes on the images moving in front of her and only nodded. “Kara’s gametes move faster than human sperm, and they pierce the wall of the egg cell nearly effortlessly.” She paused and then said, “I don’t mean to pry and you certainly don’t have to respond to this observation one way or the other, but I would be surprised if Kara’s reproductive cells required more than one or two fertilization attempts to achieve a pregnancy.”

Alex merely nodded, eyes still on the search-and-fertilize mission playing out on the monitor in front of her; she would have answered Dr. Hamilton with that information immediately, scientist to scientist, but she wasn’t sure her voice would work. 

When they were young she had taken Kara into her body twice, both times during one hazy, emotional, overwrought week. That point, that summer, had been the apex of their passion and confusion and things had been very, very messy. It had felt incredible, incredibly _right_ , to have Kara inside her, and it had also felt unmistakably like sex, and she, at least, had been unready to face that. “That’s supported by our experience,” she finally managed to say with some semblance of calm. “We only had intercourse twice, and I very well could already have been pregnant the second time.”

Dr. Hamilton nodded and went on without comment. “The next concern, and this is of course the chief concern, is how a Kryptonian embryo would fare in a human uterus. All the indications are that the embryo would be in no danger from you. Even on Krypton, without the yellow-sun effect bolstering their physiology, Kryptonian fetuses were extraordinarily hardy in comparison with humans. That was what made the Codex and the artificiality of late Kryptonian reproduction possible.

“Which brings us to the issue of what carrying a Kryptonian infant to term might do to a human body.” Dr. Hamilton chose that moment to take a big swig of her coffee, making Alex want to punch her and scream, _Get to the point!_ “It’s not impossible that there would be some effect analogous to Rh factor that would make the Kryptonian tissue attack the human host, but it seems unlikely. We’ve done enough blood transfusion to have seen that kind of rejection if it was going to happen. Likewise, Kryptonian physiology has demonstrated itself to be adaptable enough that the uterus’s rejection of Kryptonian cells is only a remote possibility.

“Internal injury from unusually strong fetal movement is another theoretical complication, but that too seems unlikely on examination. Fetal movement is not free movement. By the time an embryo is large enough to have the strength to do damage, it will be snugly surrounded by the uterine muscles, which are pretty darn strong themselves. And, given the healing rate of Kara’s cells, and extrapolating from the information we have about her physical maturation, it’s probable that a half-Kryptonian’s gestation period would be significantly shorter than a human’s, and the baby would be viable when it was much younger and smaller than a fully human baby.”

“How much shorter?” Alex wanted to know. That seemed like a big bonus.

“Hard to say. My best prediction would be around thirty weeks.” Dr. Hamilton looked dissatisfied. “I’d really like to give you more concrete information, but this is all informed guesswork. We will monitor you very, very closely, and we will make sure that there are red lamps available at all times as a safety precaution.” She held up a hand to indicate that there was yet more. “We also don’t know what might happen in terms of the drain on your body. A rapidly growing embryo with an extremely high metabolic rate would logically require you to provide, and therefore ingest, a lot more calories than an ordinary expectant mother. So there’s going to be careful attention to your nutrition.” She quirked a smile. “I’m afraid you’ll be in for a lot of mother-henning.”

Alex nodded again, pretty well satisfied with Dr. Hamilton’s assessment. It was about what she’d expected, given her own extensive investigations into Kara’s biology.

“Alex, I think I ought to ask, in the interests of you as my patient and of your potential child—” Dr. Hamilton hesitated. “I understood, from our previous visits, that you were involved quite seriously with another partner.” She held up a hand. “I’m not making a judgment here, but you are going to need all the support you can get, and conflict or instability might be more of a problem during a pregnancy like this than—”

Alex interrupted her with, “Maggie and I are still involved quite seriously. More than ever, to be honest. In fact—” She knew she was blushing again. “I think Maggie should probably come and see you as well. For, um, the same reasons.”

This time Dr. Hamilton was unable to squelch her reaction, and her eyebrows shot up before she could get them under control. “Oh. I see. I think. Of course.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is some discussion of Kryptonian culture in this chapter. _I made it up._ Don’t go looking for more fun stuff about these naming conventions and social mores in the original DC material (or, you can if you want, but it won’t be there). What I've done probably contradicts the received Superman canon, but I’m never gonna know because I’m never gonna look at it.

Maggie prompted Alex for the full report as they prepped dinner. “What did the good doctor have to say?”

“She’s thrilled for all of us and thinks we’ll be wonderful parents, and she’s pretty crushed that she isn’t going to be able to get her groundbreaking research on human-alien hybridization into a medical journal.”

“Yeah, she’s in a perish-if-you-publish situation.” They laughed, and Maggie went on more seriously, “I want to know what she thinks about how risky this is.”

Alex chewed on a handful of julienned carrots and said, little orange twigs jerking up and down as she spoke, “She’s pretty much in agreement with what I was theorizing. Very little threat to the embryo from us, a remote possibility that there could be an adverse reaction to a human host from Kryptonian cells, physiological challenges that we’ll have to keep an eye on.”

“ ‘Physiological challenges’?” Maggie gave her a look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Needing to eat a lot, number one. Number two, having a superstrong fetus in a regular-strong uterus,” Alex said, shrugging to minimize the implications. “Dr. Hamilton believes, and I concur, that there’s not much likelihood of internal injuries. Pregnancy will probably be shorter by eight to ten weeks, which means the baby won’t reach the physical strength it would have at forty weeks. The baby is going to be completely squished up in the muscles of the uterus”—Alex wrapped her hands around a tomato to demonstrate—“and by the time it gets strong enough to do any damage, it won’t have much freedom of movement.”

Maggie raised an eyebrow. “Somehow I don’t find that comforting. Though I like the sound of being pregnant for ten fewer weeks.”

Alex grinned. “Well, if there’re any problems, we’ll live under a red lamp for the duration.”

“What’s a red lamp?” Maggie wanted to know.

“It simulates the red sun of Krypton,” Alex answered, “and it dramatically reduces the yellow-sun effect. After a few minutes in a red-lit room, Kara’s powers fade, but it doesn’t make her sick like kryptonite does. It’s a pretty new technology, but so far it’s shown a number of useful applications—it lets us get a needle into her skin to do bloods, for instance, and she can receive bodywork that actually has an effect on her muscles.”

“Alex,” Maggie said. “Why do we not have a red lamp?”

Alex looked at her, startled. “We don’t want Kara to be powerless outside the protection of the DEO,” she said, as if stating something obvious.

“Alex,” Maggie said with exaggerated patience, “why do we not have a red lamp _in our bedroom_?”

“What?” And then Alex caught up, and her eyes widened. “Oh. _Oh._ I never even thought of that.”

Maggie put her hand on her forehead. “Sometimes, Danvers, I wonder if all those years without decent sex permanently addled your neural connections.”

 

 

“Guys! You want to watch a movie? The latest X-Men just hit Netflix.”

Alex looked over at Maggie, a merry glint in her eye. “Actually, we had another plan.”

Maggie grinned, the knowledge of what they were about to do spinning and sparking in her chest. 

Alex held out her hand to Kara, backing toward the bed. Kara waggled her eyebrows and followed her. “Okay. I’m convinced.”

They landed together in a heap, one of Kara’s hands already busy pulling Alex’s shirt out of her jeans while the other fumbled at Maggie’s belt.

“Wait, wait,” Alex laughed. “Slow down, sailor.”

Kara looked exaggeratedly hurt.

“We,” Alex glanced over at Maggie, “have been talking about some things. For a couple of months, actually.”

Longer than that, Maggie thought. Almost since the three of us started this whatever-it-is. Since it became clear that we were all in, all of us, for as long as it could last.

Kara’s playful-hurt expression turned genuinely apprehensive.

“Good things,” Maggie hastened to add, and Kara’s face cleared a little.

“We’re in a great place now,” Alex said, her eyes on Kara’s, her words steady. “Things are as stable as they’re ever going to get at the DEO. Maggie’s up for promotion and she’s got more comp time than she can use. You’re not getting saddled with every overnight anymore.”

Kara cocked her head, putting all this together.

Alex took a deep breath. “If you still want to, I, we think it might be time to try to have a baby.”

Kara’s eyes rounded, and for a split second her mouth hung open. Then she flung herself on them with a squeal, an arm around each one, and they all briefly left the bed before Kara got herself under control. “Yes! Yes, I still want to. I really, really want to.”

“We thought you might,” Maggie laughed.

 

 

Alex rode Kara’s hips, eyes closed, breasts swaying, mouth forming soundless, meaningless words. She was stroking her own clit as Kara’s aorosh worked within her, and Maggie, her mouth and hands at Kara’s breasts, could intermittently see the broad shaft disappearing into Alex’s hungry pink inner lips. It was mesmerizing, Alex’s fingers working at the soft flesh of her clit, the opening of her cunt stretched around the naked swollen muscle of Kara’s aorosh, letting it slip out just a bit and swallowing it again, over and over.

Maggie wondered if she could ... She turned her body, giving a last pinch to each of Kara’s nipples, and crawled down the bed a little, bringing her face between Alex’s legs, chin at Kara’s pubic bone. She reached with her tongue and yes, she could just touch Alex’s clit. She pushed up to look at Alex. “Lean back,” she ordered. “Put your hands down behind you.”

Alex nodded, figuring out what Maggie wanted, and fell back, her arms behind her propping her up, head hanging back. She groaned: “Oh god, that’s good—that’s even better, Kara, now you’re right against—Oh _fuck_.” The last word came as a response to Maggie’s pressing the flat of her tongue against her clit.

Maggie pushed and stroked, used her bottom lip and her chin and her tongue. She put one hand over the column of muscle above Alex’s pubic mound, feeling the power of Alex’s abs and, god, could she actually feel Kara pressing up from inside? The pressure within and without tore a cry from Alex’s throat. “Oh fuck, don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t ever stop, that’s amazing, I never—Ohgodimgonnacome,” and she did, thighs desperately squeezing Kara’s hips, a hand coming up to fist in Maggie’s hair and pull her hard into her cunt and then, just as hard, to pull her away. Maggie felt a warm splash and opened her eyes to see that Kara’s belly was dripping.

Alex sat upright, her face flushed crimson. “I’ve never done that before,” she gasped out.

Maggie sat up and put her hand on Kara’s wet abs: “Wow,” she breathed.

Kara, behind Maggie’s shoulder, said urgently, “Alex, Alex, come here, come here, I’m almost there, I’m coming inside you—” and Alex collapsed forward onto Kara’s chest murmuring, “Come for me, Kara, come in me.”

The jerk of Kara’s hips and her high, wordless cry told Maggie that she’d come, and she wrapped her arm around Alex’s shoulders just as Kara’s arms went around her too. All three of them lay panting in a pile until Alex groaned.

“What’s wrong?” Kara asked immediately. 

“It’s—it’s running out of me,” Alex said. “I know it doesn’t really matter, it only takes one cell, but it feels like—”

“Lie on your back,” Maggie said, knowing as well as Alex did that it was an emotional and not a physiological need but that it was still a need. “Between us.” They all shifted and rearranged themselves until Alex was in the middle with the other two curled up to her, her legs draped over Maggie’s and Kara’s. Maggie reached down and felt around until she found the edge of the comforter and pulled it up over them. She ran her hand down Alex’s body to her belly and found Kara’s hand already there. They smiled at each other over Alex’s chest, intertwining their fingers, knowing that just beneath their palms a miracle was happening.

 

 

When they stirred from sleep an hour or so later, Kara said, “So Alex, I know Dr. Hamilton said that my sex cells are extra powerful—”

“Super,” Alex said, chuckling.

“Whatever,” Kara said, kissing her. “Still. I think we should be sure, right? I think we should probably do that again. For insurance.” She grinned and started to clamber onto Alex, who gave her a straight-arm.

“Nope,” Alex announced. 

“My turn,” Maggie murmured into Kara’s ear. 

“Oh,” Kara said, delighted, and adjusted herself over Maggie’s body. Kara’s sweet slow smile, and the kiss that followed, warmed Maggie from within. When their mouths broke apart, Kara reached over Alex, fumbling for the drawer of the nightstand. 

Alex touched her wrist to stop her. “Nope,” she said again, with affected sternness this time.

“Kara,” Maggie said, voice rich with love, “when I said my turn, I meant my turn.”

Kara looked confused. 

“Alex said baby, she didn’t say _her_ baby,” Maggie said. She slid her hands down to Kara’s hips and pulled, bringing Kara between her legs and rolling her hips up in invitation. “We’re gonna fill this house with little Kryptonians,” she whispered, loud enough for both Kara and Alex to hear.

Kara’s mouth dropped open and she stared at Maggie in astonishment. Then she turned her head and stared at Alex in astonishment, who smiled back. “Come on, mama,” she said to Kara, pushing at her shoulder. “You’ve got work to do.”

“Oh, Rao,” Kara breathed. Then she looked down at Maggie, who grinned up at her and cocked an eyebrow. “Oh Rao.” And suddenly, without preamble, there was one powerful thrust and Maggie was filled with Kara’s solid heat.

Maggie’s cry punched out between them, and Kara tumbled out, “Oh Maggie, I’m sorry, that was too much, I’m sorry, I just ...”

“It felt _great_ ,” Maggie panted. “Just don’t _stop_.”

Kara gazed into Maggie’s eyes, looking for certainty, and she found it. She didn’t say anything more. She held herself firm against Maggie’s hips and her aorosh pumped and pounded, rubbed hard and probed deep.

Maggie had gotten used to the movement of Kara’s aorosh within her—as much as she would ever get used to something that was physiologically impossible—but this, tonight, was more, new. Kara was always so, so careful; she focused hard on Maggie’s pleasure, remembering what she liked best and how she liked it, and she controlled how she moved inside her. Right now, though, Kara was a storm. This was _fucking_ , and for the first time Maggie felt exactly how powerful and strange Kara’s body was. She bit her lip and wrapped her legs around Kara’s hips and held on.

She was accustomed to Kara taking her time, stroking along the firm, sensitive muscle of her anterior wall, pushing deep inside against her cervix in a way that flooded her with pleasure. This unexpected fierceness hurt a little, but it was a good hurt, the best kind of hurt. She pushed her hands between them and took her own nipples in her fingers, rolling and pinching. Kara, noticing, mouthed down to Maggie’s breast and took a nipple hard in her teeth. It was electric, animal, a kind of claiming Maggie had never felt from Kara. 

And then, too soon, Kara ejaculated within her for the first time. Maggie had half expected to feel an actual spurt, which she didn’t (could it have been masked by all the other intense sensations? was it just a porn myth?), but she felt Kara’s body stiffen in a very familiar way and then, suddenly, the place where they were joined was even wetter and slipperier than it had been. Kara didn’t retract her aorosh or pull out but stayed hard inside her, collapsing heavily on top of her, whispering brokenly into her ear in what had to be Kryptahniuo.

After a few more moments, Kara said, “I’m sorry, Maggie.”

“For what?”

“That couldn’t have been—you didn’t come, it was selfish—”

“I liked it,” Maggie said. 

“I liked it,” Alex said, next to them, “and I couldn’t even feel it.”

“I don’t have to come to feel satisfied,” Maggie continued. “You know that by now.”

“You keep saying it,” Kara said into her neck. “I have to work pretty hard to believe it.”

“Believe it,” Maggie said, her eyes closing, imagining microscopic Karas rushing into her womb. She hooked her ankles together behind Kara’s back, and she felt Kara kissing her neck and cheek on the left, from atop her, and Alex nuzzling into the right side of her face from where she lay next to her.

 

 

Long drowsy moments passed; they shifted slightly, Kara reluctantly withdrawing from Maggie and moving to cuddle into her from the side to keep from crushing her. 

“What about names?” Maggie asked suddenly. “I don’t like the idea that they’ll have different last names.”

“They don’t have to,” Alex answered sleepily. “They can all be Danverses.”

The silence from Maggie was a little huffy.

“Or Sawyers?” Kara asked, placatingly.

“Sawyer is what some white guy in Nebraska talked my dad into changing Suarez to,” Maggie said. “I don’t have any attachment to it.”

“Suarez then?”

“Only one of them will be Latino.”

“Latinx,” Kara said into Maggie’s neck. “We’re going to have to have a whole Kryptonian baby-gender conversation soon.”

“Right.” Maggie waved her hand, banishing the subject to some later complicated discussion. “Only one Latinx, and only part Latinx at that. So that seems weird. But it also seems weird that everybody ends up a Danvers except me.”

“Zor-El,” Alex said. “That’s Kara’s true last name. No human ethnic connections, and isn’t the point of all of this that we are founding a Kryptonian family?”

Kara nodded thoughtfully. “I like that idea. Zor-El, though—that’s my father’s name. My children wouldn’t have had that name on Krypton.”

“What would they have? Their father’s name, I guess,” Maggie asked and then answered herself.

“Yeah ... but here I’m sort of their father. Even though I’m their mother. So really they should take my name, except I don’t have the kind of name that’s a family name.”

“I’ve wondered about that,” Maggie said. “Why you’re Kara Zor-El, but Clark is Kal-El. Shouldn’t he be Kal Jor-El?”

“It’s a social role thing—like gender, but it’s not gender exactly. It doesn’t have to do with your biology; it has to do with who you are. It was more about the kind of care and support you gave your family, or your house, without any physical connotation.”

“I am deeply confused,” Maggie said slowly. 

“I’m Kara, not Kar-El, because I’m—well, your closest word is female, but that’s not really the same as Krypton’s social roles. Still. On Krypton, I probably would have been the mother of a family—though _mother_ doesn’t have the same gender associations that it does here, because that’s not how it worked. I mean, you could be the one to give birth and still be the father. Or, in the old times, when people had more children, one partner might have some of the children and the other one would have the rest.

“Here, though, because of the way you confuse the biological role and the parental role, I’ll probably be more like the father of the family. And again, that’s not a male-female thing, because we didn’t have that exactly, but I’m the—progenitor, I guess? And that partner would be the naming partner. _Namer:_ that’s a better word than father. It doesn’t have all the male business attached. The other role is more like _organizer_ , though that isn’t very—it’s more spiritual than that. The children would have child-names and the family name was their namer’s. When the kids grew up, they might take an additional syllable or two, if they turned out to be organizers instead of namers. If they did become namers, they’d combine their child name and house name to create a new family name.”

After a moment’s thought Alex summarized it: “So you were Kar. You became Kara, but if you’d become a namer, you would have been Kar-El.”

“Right.”

“So there we have it. Our children will be Kar-Els.”

“The House of Kar-El. I like it,” Maggie said, satisfied.

Kara raised herself up on one elbow and looked over the naked skin of the women of the House of Kar-El. She reached over and stroked Alex’s shoulder, then trailed onto Maggie’s chest and down her body, brushing at last into her pubic hair. She tangled her fingertips there (she loved Maggie’s thick dark bush; her first intimate request of Maggie had been that she stop shaving) and said seriously, “We’re still not absolutely sure that we’ve managed to continue my house yet.”

“Hmm,” Alex adopted Kara’s serious tone. “Are you suggesting a repetition of the introduction of your genetic material?”

“It certainly couldn’t hurt,” Kara pointed out.

“Agreed,” Maggie said, a little breathlessly. “In the spirit of thoroughness we should—oh _sweet jesus_ ,” losing the thread as Kara’s fingers moved lower still.

“Yes,” Kara said firmly. “We should.”


	13. Chapter 13

The tests they took ten days later weren’t any less nerve-racking for being, theoretically, a formality. They still didn’t _know_ , no matter what the science suggested, and the fact that Alex had thrown up twice in the previous three days, and had slept for ten hours the night before and eleven hours the night before that? Kara was hoping that was the result of a stomach bug, in truth, because a trimester or so of Alex feeling like that was going to be very, very hard on everyone.

They all sat at the big table in Kara’s apartment, where a cloth napkin covered two pregnancy tests. 

“It would probably be better if we weren’t both pregnant,” Maggie said, drumming with her fingertips on the table in front of her. “I mean, really, what were we thinking? What if we went into labor at the same time? Even if it happened a day or two apart. Actually, that might be even worse.”

Alex had her head bowed over her interlaced fingers. She looked up at Maggie and snapped, “Do you want to be the one who isn’t pregnant? I sure don’t want to be the one who isn’t pregnant.”

“Okay,” Kara said soothingly, putting a hand on Alex’s shoulder and taking Maggie’s agitated fingers in her own across the table. “Whatever this says, it’s going to be fine. We all want a family together, and we’ll get it, whether it’s at this minute or sometime later.”

Alex took a deep breath. Maggie closed her eyes. The timer on Kara’s phone went off.

“Ready?” Kara looked around. Neither Maggie nor Alex met her eyes. She sighed and took the napkin in two fingers. “Ta-da,” she trilled, and pulled the cloth away.

All three of them stared for a long moment at the two plastic sticks with the two cheery plus signs on them. Then they screamed. And cried. And got up and danced with their arms around each other. And laughed. And cried some more.

 

 

“We really do need a bigger apartment,” Alex said that night, lying between Maggie and Kara after a long, slow, joyful, emotional evening. “Not just because we need room for the kids but because if I don’t have space of my own, I’m going to kill you both.” The last phrase could have sounded like a joke, if someone else had said it, but Alex delivered it as an unvarnished statement of fact.

Kara and Maggie eyed each other. Neither one of them felt threatened by very much—Kara by almost nothing—but they both had a healthy respect for Alex’s capabilities, and temper.

“I won’t want to,” Alex went on. “But I will.”

Maggie nodded thoughtfully. It had occurred to her as well that Alex—all of them, of course, but especially Alex—needed privacy and time alone. There was a reason she and Alex had never moved in together, why Alex and Kara had always had their own places even when they spent most of their time in each other’s apartments. Adding to the pressure of their individual needs for solitude were the requirements of four intimate adult relationships; the three of them comprised three couples and a trio, every combination of which demanded attention. “What do you suggest? Should we keep all three places? Move around between them?”

Kara shook her head. “That’s not practical. Sometimes we do all want to be together, and no one place is big enough for that.”

“Mmm, yes. And babies require an enormous amount of stuff,” Maggie added as she thought it through. “We can’t stock each place with everything we need.”

Alex sighed heavily. “We’ve got some time,” she said. “But not a lot.”

“Oh, come on,” Kara grumbled. “You guys are each ten days pregnant. We have, what—”

“We don’t _know_ what,” Alex reminded her. “Maybe thirty weeks, which is ... seven months and a bit. And we do not want to be packing and moving in our third trimester. Trimesters.” She laughed a little hysterically. “Wow, getting us pregnant simultaneously might have been a really stupid idea.”

“It’s a little late to think about that now,” Maggie said sourly.

“It was fun, though,” Kara said dreamily. “It was _really_ fun.”

 

 

Less than a month later the solution came—or, if not quite a solution, a situation that they could work with.

Kara, even more wound up than usual, bounced into Alex’s apartment where Maggie and Alex were eating leftovers at the kitchen island. “You remember when we were out walking in that nice leafy neighborhood after we got ice cream at the hipster artisan place with the weird flavors?”

“Yeah,” Maggie answered. “I had sesame caramel sorbet and you had some kind of godawful pineapple mint thing. Edgewood? Is that the neighborhood?”

“Right. And we walked past a row of brick townhouses, and there were two of them for sale, and you said, ‘That’s exactly what we need’?”

“Nice big houses next door to each other. Yes.” 

Kara took a deep breath. “Did you really think that was a good plan, or were you just joking?”

“Both, I guess. It would be awesome, but there’s no way we could actually do it.”

Kara looked excited and guilty and loving and afraid all at once, a combination that perhaps only she could pull off.

“There’s no way,” Maggie repeated. “Right?”

Kara said sheepishly, “I might have kind of bought them.”

Maggie swiveled to stare at her. “How the hell could you afford to do that? You’re a junior reporter. You make less than a rookie cop.” 

Kara mumbled something indistinct, and Alex laughed. “Oh my God. Louder, Kara. Maggie needs to hear that too.”

Kara lifted her chin and said clearly, defiantly, “I licensed the crest of the House of El.” 

“What?” Maggie exclaimed, dumbfounded. “When?”

“A while ago. Cat Grant helped set it up. For Supergirl, obviously, not for me. She found me a copyright attorney and got the whole process started. I share the income with Clark but it’s still a lot of money.”

Maggie slid off her stool and paced around the kitchen island. A thousand thoughts jumbled in her head, and while some were excited and happy, a hefty share were confused and dark as well. “You can’t just _keep_ me, Kara,” she burst out after a few moments.

Kara shook her head slowly, eyes not leaving Maggie as she walked in circles. “I couldn’t if I wanted to,” she said. “I pretty much burned through my available cash with the purchase, so we’re all going to have to pitch in to keep the places. Insurance, taxes, maintenance, utilities. We’re not going to be saving much moving in together.”

Alex muttered, “I bet the taxes are a bitch.”

Kara nodded. “About triple my current rent.”

Maggie looked a little relieved, and then a little worried, but she kept stalking around the island. After another couple of circuits she stopped and said, “Another thing.”

“Yeah?” Alex asked.

“I’ve never lived in a neighborhood full of clueless rich white people before,” Maggie said. “But I’ve been a beat cop in those places, and I’ve responded to calls from those places, and mostly those people very politely treat me like shit.”

Kara looked outraged; Alex looked grimly resigned. 

“So when our neighbors assume I’m the housekeeper or the nanny,” Maggie went on, “it is going to be up to the two of you to take that on. I deal with white people condescending to me all fucking day, I am not fighting that fight in my home.”

Kara nodded vigorously, already looking thunderous. Alex touched her hand. “Kara,” she said gently. “You can’t punch racism. It would be great if you could because you’d totally win, but it doesn’t work like that. Especially not with this kind—the kind that doesn’t even know it exists.” Her mouth twitched. “I’ve already learned, a little, being with Maggie, that it’s something aggravating every day, it’s never a showdown.” She looked over at Maggie, still standing opposite them, and said, “Absolutely, Mags. That one’s our job.”

Maggie let out a breath and relaxed a tiny bit. It remained to be seen whether they could really protect her the way she needed them to, but she trusted that they would try.

 

 

Alex had a terrible first few weeks. She was exhausted all the time, and she could barely keep anything down—if she managed to eat anything at all, which she often couldn’t. 

“This isn’t what it was like before,” she gasped out, leaning over a basin in Dr. Hamilton’s office. 

Dr. Hamilton raised her eyebrows. “You were nineteen before,” she pointed out. “A few things have changed.”

Alex closed her eyes and groaned.

She required bland food packed with nutrients, which for several weeks consisted of multi-ingredient, supplement-spiked smoothies that Kara made by the half gallon and administered patiently, sip by sip, while Alex told her that she hated her. Kara cleaned the bathroom, did the laundry, managed the closings on two houses, planned renovations and relocations, went to work, and tried to maintain her ordinary cheerfulness level.

Maggie, on the other hand, felt wonderful—bursting with energy, ecstatically present in her body. She also felt guilty, more than a little, because Alex was miserable. 

Part of the guilt came from the fact that her sex drive, always strong, had kicked up to insatiable. While Alex was lying on the couch trying not to throw up her whole wheat saltines and prenatal vitamins, Maggie was bullying Kara into coming over to her apartment and fucking the daylights out of her. Every day. Sometimes twice. In an ideal world, this would have helped Kara maintain that all-important cheerfulness level (and she certainly didn’t complain), but in reality, she was very, very tired.

Then ten weeks came, and everything changed. Over a few days Alex’s nausea and exhaustion lessened, nearly imperceptibly, until one morning she woke up and realized that she felt completely normal. Better than normal.

One day later, Maggie put a hand to her abdomen and grimaced. “Ow,” she said. 

Kara was instantly at her side. “What’s wrong?” 

“Calm down, Worrygirl. Just a twinge.”

“That’s a bad place for a twinge,” Kara pressed. 

“Look, it’s gone, I probably just stood up funny and pulled a muscle or something.”

“If it happens again ...” Kara’s brow was furrowed in concern.

“If it happens again, I’ll let you know.”

It happened again, and again, and worse. By nine o’clock that night, Kara was a wreck, and she finally convinced Maggie to let her take her to the DEO. “But you are not flying me there. _No_ , Kara. I said no.”

They met Dr. Hamilton in the med bay. She listened to Maggie’s description of the symptoms, palpitated her abdomen (resulting in Maggie’s screaming an expletive and nearly resulting in Kara’s pulling Dr. Hamilton’s arm off), and did bloodwork and an ultrasound.

“The pain appears to be associated with a fibroid,” Dr. Hamilton informed them at the end of all of it. “You have a few of them, actually, but one is particularly large. That may be the one that’s causing your discomfort.”

“Is it dangerous?” Maggie asked immediately.

“No,” Dr. Hamilton reassured her. “Where it’s located, it’s not a risk to you or to the baby, and you should be able to have a normal vaginal delivery.”

Kara looked relieved. “So what do we do about it?”

Dr. Hamilton made a sympathetic grimace as she said, “We can’t do much, frankly. If Maggie weren’t pregnant, there would be the option of surgery, but obviously that’s not possible right now.”

Maggie frowned. “Will the pain go away?”

There was an uncomfortably long pause. “It will, but I can’t say when,” Dr. Hamilton hedged. “You appear to be experiencing carneous degeneration of the fibroid, which happens when the fibroid outgrows its blood supply due to the changes in your hormonal environment. Sometimes that kind of pain comes and goes throughout the pregnancy, sometimes it simply goes away after a few days or weeks.”

Maggie sighed. “Is it going to get worse?”

“Again,” Dr. Hamilton said, squirming in her chair with an eye on Kara, “I can’t tell you for sure. But it might take a while before it gets better.” She added with forced brightness, “I can tell you that it will definitely end as soon as the baby is delivered.”

Kara no longer looked relieved. “She’s just going to hurt for the rest of the time she’s pregnant?”

“I hope not.” Which meant _It’s possible_. 

Kara put her head in her hands. Alex being sick had been bad. Very bad. Maggie being in pain—that could be much, much worse.

It transpired that even though Maggie could be shot or stabbed and hardly turn a hair, her threshold for chronic discomfort was significantly lower. In a perfect, ironic reversal, Maggie took Alex’s sad place on the couch, while a reenergized Alex, free from her weeks of lethargy and vomiting, took over Maggie’s daily-plus sex regimen. 

Kara knew that two newborns would mean exhaustion and interrupted rest for weeks, if not months. She was looking forward to the peace of it.

 

 

The houses needed some major modifications before they could move in—notably internal passages between the two structures—which, of course, took longer than anyone expected. Permits, inspectors, architects, contractors who left the country, contractors who didn’t show up in the first place. Kara wanted to simply punch through the walls. Alex and Maggie had to yell at her pretty loudly to get her to stop.

“If you knock a giant hole in this house’s supporting wall with your fist, I’m not living in it,” Maggie warned.

“Kara, being able to lift a building doesn’t make you a structural engineer,” Alex added. “I’ve seen entire city blocks fall down after you got through with them.”

It was much closer to the due date than anyone wanted it to be before they got everything in order, and it might not have happened in time if it hadn’t been for Lena Luthor.

Kara had desperately needed someone to talk to. She had James and Winn, of course, but both of them were uncomfortably close to Alex and Maggie as well as herself. She had been in Lena’s office having a late-night cocktail, an occasion that was becoming more and more frequent. She’d brought a flask (the alien alcohol in Alex’s apartment was mysteriously disappearing as the demands on Kara increased), explaining rather too loquaciously that “I brought my own because it’s ... organic! Because regular booze gives me a headache! Because of the ... sulfites!” and was thus well past discretion and rounding on total filterlessness. Finally she’d taken a deep, dramatic breath and said, “Lena, I have to tell you something. I—it’s important, and I’ve wanted to tell you for so long, but it just didn’t seem safe, for you I mean, and I suppose it’s still not, but I can’t stand it any more, and ...”

“Spit it out, Kara,” Lena said, three glasses into a very nice Italian red herself. 

So Kara had. She began with the big reveal: “I’m Supergirl.”

To her shock and, after a moment, her annoyance, Lena started to laugh. Then she kept laughing. She laughed and laughed, doubling over, tears coming to her eyes. Kara had never seen her laugh so hard or so long.

“I’m serious,” Kara snapped. “I’m really Supergirl.”

Lena nodded, still unable to speak. After a few more moments of deep, body-shaking, breath-stealing guffaws, she managed to hold back her hysterics long enough to gasp out, “I believe you. It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?” Kara asked, puzzled and irritated.

Lena took a deep breath, and another, and managed to taper off into giggles. “Oh, Kara. You actually thought you were in _disguise_?”

Kara was dreadfully embarrassed.

But she went ahead and told Lena the rest of it. Alex, Maggie, Alex and Maggie, her biology, her coming offspring, the mess of their living arrangements. Lena had listened incredulously, mercifully not bursting into laughter again, with that one cocked eyebrow and a half smile.

“You got two women pregnant at the same time? Kara, I think you might have a career playing in the NBA.” 

Kara hadn’t been amused.

“And now this house,” she’d groaned. “Houses. And the job’s half started, so we can’t move in, but I don’t have any idea how we’re going to get it finished, and the babies will be here in maybe three months, which would seem like a long time except I can’t get a contractor to stick around for more than four _days_ ...”

“Look,” Lena had said at last, when Kara had dropped her head in despair to the table in front of her, “I have an entire facilities management department, and they do this kind of thing five times before breakfast. I’m going to lend you a project manager and a GC, and you’re going to be fine.” She’d smirked. “At least, your _house_ is going to be fine.”

Five working days later the structural changes were finished, and all that was left was a small crew plastering and painting. 

“This was magic, Lena,” Kara breathed, admiring the smooth wall and the new doorframe on the second floor. On the first floor the entire rear of the house had been opened up, with the addition of some support beams, to create a massive open living space.

Lena, who had come over at their insistence to see what she had made possible, said dryly, “This was _money_ , Kara.” She quirked her lips and added, “They do have a lot in common.”

 

 

Maggie’s abdominal pain came and went and came and went and finally, at about twenty-two weeks, went. At around the same time, the bliss of Alex’s release from morning sickness evolved into back pain. Maggie then had almost two weeks of being able to sympathize and rub Alex’s back and make her brownies, until her ankles started to swell.

Maggie had been noticeably pregnant at sixteen weeks, Alex only a few days behind; at twenty-four weeks, it was unmistakable even from a distance. The babies, Dr. Hamilton told them, were well-developed and active and probably the equivalent of a twenty-eight-week human fetus. 

Neither Alex nor Maggie could sleep very well any more, and both of them wanted Kara close at hand, so they all spent the nights in Alex’s bed, now installed on the top floor of their eastern townhouse. Kara held them both to her, feeling the movement within them as they slept, and was happier than she could ever remember being.

They had long evenings in, discussing names and comparison shopping for strollers and baby wraps. “If you had told me two years ago,” Alex said one night, “that this was going to be my life, I would have hit you in the head and told you you were an idiot.”

“And then downed a shot and roared off on your Ducati,” Maggie said, half asleep on the couch. The Ducati and the Triumph were both in long-term storage.

“They have faces,” Kara said abstractly, her hand on Maggie’s belly.

“Motorcycles?” Alex asked, startled.

“No, silly. The babies,” Kara answered. She hadn’t been paying attention.

Alex smiled. “I’d hope so,” she said.

“That’s just occurred to you?” Maggie teased, her fingers twining in Kara’s.

“It’s—it’s just a lot closer to being real,” Kara said. She turned her head to look at Alex in a chair at the dining table, one hand on her bulging abdomen in a classic pregnant-woman pose.

“It’s real all right,” Alex confirmed. Then she winced. “Ow. That was quite a kick.”

Kara narrowed her eyes. “Painful?”

Alex shrugged.

“Do you want to sleep under the red light tonight?”

Alex shrugged again. “Couldn’t hurt.”

Since Alex almost never consented to do anything that was about her comfort, Kara made a mental note to pay very careful attention over the next days.

Both Alex and Maggie slept more soundly that night, which was simultaneously gratifying and worrisome; Kara was thankful that they’d gotten better rest, but the fact that reducing the babies’ strength was such a relief made her think that they might be getting dangerous.

She made a sneak visit to Dr. Hamilton in the morning and gave her a panicked update.

Dr. Hamilton listened carefully as Kara wound through her concerns, and then as she ran out of steam said gently, “Kara. Pregnancy is really uncomfortable. Late pregnancy is especially uncomfortable. Their ligaments are stretched, their joints are carrying much more weight than they’re used to, their lungs don’t have as much space to expand, and yes, they’re getting kicked and punched as the babies move. But that’s true for all pregnant women, and none of them enjoy it. It’s great that you’re staying on top of all Alex and Maggie’s symptoms—I wouldn’t trust Alex to come tell me something was wrong if her baby stuck its foot into her liver—but I’m also seeing them both every week for a thorough examination and believe me, we will have plenty of warning if the babies begin to pose a danger to their moms.”

“But the red lamps make them feel better,” Kara sputtered.

“The red lamps appear to have helped them sleep last night,” Dr. Hamilton corrected. “That’s not much of a sample, and we can’t prove causation. You’re a better scientist than that, Kara.”

Kara nodded sheepishly. “I know. I’m just worried.”

“Of course you are,” Dr. Hamilton said cheerfully. “There is absolutely nothing you can do right now except worry.”

“Thanks,” Kara grumbled.


	14. Chapter 14

Kara was grateful, consciously grateful, for many, many things in her life—always, but especially now that both of the women she loved were hugely pregnant and uncomfortably close to giving birth. 

Kara was grateful for Alex’s disciplined scientist’s mind. Alex had done meticulous research on diet, exercise, and childbirth. It was thanks to her that they had fully developed birth plans and that both she and Maggie had worked through what they wanted during labor, from music to medical intervention. Alex had also catalogued the enormous number of baby products they apparently needed and created a spreadsheet comparing various brands: strollers (two singles and a double), cribs, travel cribs, changing tables, car seats, play mats, toys, bottles, bottle warmers, breast pumps, carriers, monitors, diapers ... Maggie admitted that in each case she would have bought the first sale item she found that didn’t have a Disney character on it.

Kara was grateful for Maggie’s insistence on direct and complete communication. She was pretty sure that, despite her usefulness, she might have spent many nights in resentful exile in the downstairs bedroom if it weren’t for Maggie’s persistence in diagnosing their various angers and misunderstandings and working them out. There were no fewer of those than there had been before, of course, but now two of the three of them were physically uncomfortable and, though neither of them wanted to admit it, intensely anxious. The unsurprising result was a spike in the number of small irritations that blew up into major conflicts. Around five months Maggie made a sign and stuck it to the refrigerator: IS THAT REALLY WHAT YOU’RE MAD ABOUT? The question became a running joke but also a peace-preserving reminder.

Kara was grateful for Alex’s enormous bed, which made possible the limited, fitful sleep that Alex and Maggie got. Neither one could sleep on her belly or back, and it was only intermittently comfortable for them to be on their sides. The size of the bed also made it possible to address the challenge of sex. There was no longer any question of Alex and Maggie having sex with each other; how Kara could have sex with either of them was increasingly a puzzle, but they both required it to be solved, often simultaneously. 

By this time, Alex just wanted Kara’s mouth. That was delightful, but logistically difficult. Alex wasn’t comfortable on her back with her legs spread, and she couldn’t be on her belly at the edge of the bed, and standing was out of the question even if Kara held her up. They settled finally on Alex’s being on her side with a knee drawn up, and Kara pillowing her head on Alex’s other thigh. The L shape they made would have left Kara’s legs hanging off any other bed. In this one, she was merely tangling her legs with Maggie’s, who liked to lie next to them and then kiss Kara deeply afterward, vicariously enjoying a pleasure she couldn’t currently experience. 

When it was Maggie’s turn, she wanted to be fucked, even bigger and deeper than she had before. Kara worried, of course, but after a torturously embarrassing conversation with Dr. Hamilton she’d accepted that she wasn’t hurting Maggie or the baby. (Dr. Hamilton had explained in much greater detail than anyone required how Maggie’s pelvic bones were softening and shifting to allow for the passage of a head between them, in comparison to which the spread of Kara’s knuckles wasn’t much.)

Kara gave Maggie what she needed—three fingers, four fingers, slow and patient and well-lubed-up, until Maggie was taking her whole hand. Maggie liked to be on her elbows and knees, as if crouching over her belly, and she liked Kara to twist her fist slowly, rolling her arm one way and then the other. Alex watched this with a wondering smile, stroking Maggie’s back, threading her fingers through Maggie’s hair, touching Kara’s wrist where it disappeared into Maggie’s body. This slow, powerful plowing was utterly not what her body wanted, but it was clear that Maggie loved and needed it. As was always true for Maggie, sometimes she came, sometimes she didn’t, but Kara wouldn’t stop until Maggie made her. She’d learned that much.

 

 

After one of these long, late-term evenings, Kara was slipping into rest-state draped across her lovers’ legs when she overheard this:

“I can’t wait for this to be over,” Maggie groaned softly, stroking her swollen belly. They had all diligently applied coconut oil and shea butter and every and any other skin softener to Maggie’s growing abdomen, but she still sported raw stretch marks. Someday they’d fade from their angry pink to a silent white, testifying to this journey into motherhood, but that wouldn’t happen for a long time.

Alex reached out, cupping Maggie’s cheek, and said, “Oh baby, I know it’s hard. But honestly, for me, I’d make it last longer if I could.” The veins stood out blue against the paleness of her belly, though she was otherwise smooth-skinned even this late into pregnancy.

“What?” Maggie sputtered incredulously.

Alex made a thoughtful humming sound and then said, “It’s just so incredible. There’s a living person inside me. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel this close to them again.” After long conversations, they’d collectively decided that the babies would be “them” until and unless they expressed a gender of their choice. Kara wasn’t unhappy with being a woman on Earth, but she was acutely aware that it hadn’t precisely been her own idea. She wanted her children to experience, as much as was possible, the fluidity she remembered from Krypton.

“I don’t want to feel this close to them anymore,” Maggie retorted. “This is way, way too close.”

Alex laughed, but said, “I don’t think I’m done, that’s all. It’s hard, physically, but I know I’m going to miss this.”

Naturally Alex went into labor first. Only a few nights later, she woke with sharp, deep pain that made her gasp and roused Kara immediately. Maggie woke not long after, to find Kara holding Alex and asking anxiously what each pain felt like, how far apart, how long. 

They called Eliza, who was wide awake as soon as she heard the words “Alex is in labor” and was on the road from Midvale half an hour later, to stay with Maggie while Alex gave birth. Kara couldn’t make herself wait until Eliza got there, though, and had Alex through the air to the DEO only a few contractions in. 

Kara, with Winn’s help and input from Maggie and Alex, had created a birthing suite from an underutilized conference room that was too near the med bay to be truly comfortable for meetings. (Most DEO personnel had unpleasant associations with the med bay; any who didn’t have those associations of their own had brought colleagues there in various states of disrepair.) She’d painted it in soothing colors and installed every apparatus either Alex or Maggie thought she might want: a bar on the wall (Alex had said confidently, “I’m going to want to squat”), a deep tub, mats, massage tools, balls, pillows. She built a solid platform bed—none of those unstable rolling hospital beds for her women, thank you—with a futon mattress and covered it with a quilt that one of Maggie’s sisters had sent. She’d put in speakers and connected an iPod loaded with music. She had even rigged a dividing wall, soundproofed, that she could put in quickly in the unlikely but potentially disastrous event that both her lovers went into labor at the same time and didn’t want anything to do with each other.

On the way Alex told Kara she was being ridiculous and overprotective. “Kara, I just started feeling contractions. It’s probably going to be hours before anything approaching active labor happens and I’m going to be stuck at the DEO listening to your Happy Birthday playlist for ten hours.”

What actually happened was that Alex’s contractions became deep, regular, and harrowingly painful within an hour. Dr. Hamilton commented cheerfully, “You’re getting right to it, Dr. Danvers! You’ve decided to cut out that whole inefficient early labor business, hmm?” 

The world narrowed to that room, and they both immediately forgot about almost all of those beautiful, thoughtful things that Kara had added to it. There was only the steady rhythm of the swell of pain, the climax of pain, and the merciful, brief ease of pain.

Time, for both Kara and Alex, took on two impossibly contradictory characters: It slowed to include only the present moment, which elongated and warped into tiny bits of eternity, and it sped past at an unreal pace. Sometimes Kara was able to look at a clock, between moments of focusing everything she had on Alex, and she was puzzled and confused every time she did. Either scant minutes had passed, or an hour. In any case, the numbers ceased to mean anything.

Alex sweated and swore through each increasingly agonizing wave of pain, but she steadily refused Dr. Hamilton’s proffered epidural. She had elected to embrace the experience as if it were some kind of extreme athletic event: Every time she rode down the ebbing of a contraction, she looked more determined than she had for the one before. Pain, after all, was Alex’s longtime companion. She knew it intimately and she was not about to let it defeat her now.

Kara fed Alex ice chips and told her she was beautiful and incredible and brave and managed to cry only in the moments that she stepped out of the birthing room into the corridor. When Winn came by to check in, she grabbed him by the shirt and hissed, “What is this, Winn? Why do you people do this? It’s killing her! Killing her!” Winn gasped out something placating, but Kara wasn’t listening anyway. “I have to go back in there and watch her suffer, and I did that to her! I made that happen! I’m a monster!” Then she spun and went back into the birthing room. “Alex, love, you’re wonderful. You’re amazing.”

Six short, endless hours after Alex was borne into the DEO in Kara’s anxious arms, the baby crowned, and thirty hard minutes after that Alex was holding small, perfect Jul Kar-El in her arms, sobbing in ecstasy and relief. 

Kara collapsed onto the bed next to them, drinking in the sight of her lover, teacher, champion, sister cradling their child. Their child. Her child. She reached out a finger and stroked a velvet-damp cheek as Jul’s mouth opened and closed with tiny wheezy snorts. For the first time since she had been a child herself, Kara felt like she was in the right place.

 

 

Alex recovered quickly, and Alex and Jul came home, and Maggie remained miserably pregnant through waves of radiant visitors and several days of piercing newborn wailing. “This is never going to be over,” she complained to Eliza, who had stayed after Jul’s birth. 

“Oh, yes it will,” Eliza replied. “There is no possible outcome that doesn’t include your pregnancy being over.”

“Does it include me killing both your smug daughters?” Maggie growled.

“I’d prefer it didn’t,” Eliza answered. It was hard to tell how exactly she had processed the news that her daughters were not only sleeping together but were also in a polyamorous relationship with a third woman, and one of them had gotten the others pregnant. Alex and Kara had sat her down and told her the whole thing, prepared for an explosion of fury or recrimination or horror or shock, but according to their bemused report she had simply said, “Ah-hah. All right,” and calmly started making plans for Christmas.

“You agree they’re smug, then,” Maggie said, seizing on the obvious.

“They certainly can be,” Eliza agreed. She looked Maggie over with a searching eye and said, “Honey, you don’t seem very comfortable.”

“I haven’t been comfortable since February,” Maggie said. She put her hands on her back and squinched up her face.

“No,” agreed Eliza. “But this does seem a little more than usual. Are you having a backache?”

“Of course,” Maggie snapped. Then, a little more calmly, she said, “It comes and goes.”

“And it’s been coming and going for how long? At this level, I mean.”

“I don’t know. A couple days?” Maggie grimaced again.

Eliza looked thoughtful. “I think it might be worth having your OB take a look at you,” she said.

By the time Kara got Maggie to the DEO for Dr. Hamilton to have a look, she was eight centimeters dilated. “What do you mean, I’m in labor?” Maggie asked, bemused. “I’m not in labor. It doesn’t hurt any more than it has for the last three weeks.” Reconsidering, she amended, “Well, not much more.”

“Sometimes it’s like that,” Dr. Hamilton answered, harried. She had everything ready, of course, but she hadn’t actually expected there to be no warning at all. 

“That’s good!” Kara exclaimed giddily. Seeing Maggie’s face, she said, “Right? That’s good, right?”

“Yeah, great,” Maggie said, feeling another wave of the dull, throbbing ache that she now knew was her version of a contraction. She was also now starting to feel queasy with each recurrence.

Kara put her forehead to Maggie’s. “This is amazing, babe,” she said earnestly. “In just a few hours we’ll finally get to meet our baby.”

“Uh huh,” Maggie answered, with significantly less enthusiasm. Queasy was quickly sliding into sick. “I think I’m—” and, leaning forward as far as her enormous belly allowed, threw up onto Kara’s knees.

Where Alex had screamed and grunted and attacked every wave of pain her body dealt her, Maggie groaned her way through each one, low rough sounds from the depths of her chest. She dug her nails into Kara’s shoulders and leaned her head into the crook of Kara’s neck, letting silent tears leak onto Kara’s shirt. It was heartbreaking, but Kara also felt purposeful in a way she hadn’t during Alex’s labor. Maggie was allowing her to hold her up. 

Alex arrived about an hour later, having settled Jul with Eliza. She looked excited and enthusiastic. She was still softer in face and body than she’d been, but she had quickly lost the swollen look and heavy movement of pregnancy. She took in the quiet, subdued feel of this delivery room, and frowned slightly. 

“Everything all right?” she asked Dr. Hamilton, under her breath. 

“Oh yes,” Dr. Hamilton said, smiling at the tableau of Kara murmuring to Maggie, stroking Maggie’s head as Maggie, squatting naked on the bed, leaned into her. The doctor eyed Alex, evaluating her concerned bewilderment, and added, “Different. But it’s going fine.”

Alex nodded slowly, and then moved carefully into place behind Maggie, spreading her hands over Maggie’s lower back. “Hey love,” she said, and Maggie groaned an acknowledgment and Kara met Alex’s eyes with a secret smile.

Maggie’s low grumbly groan abruptly changed pitch. “Holy shit,” she yelped.

Kara’s head popped up. “What’s wrong?” she asked anxiously.

“Hurts,” Maggie spat succinctly. “Fuck.”

“You’re coming into active labor,” Dr. Hamilton said reassuringly. “That’s really good. In a short while you can start pushing, and then it won’t be long at all.”

But Maggie’s body had fooled them again. After a few of the more painful and intense contractions, Dr. Hamilton did a visual exam and said, “Oh my,” in a tone of surprise. “That would be the baby’s head. Right there.”

Maggie reached down and touched, and her eyes widened. “My God,” she breathed. “That’s their head. My baby’s head.”

Kara couldn’t help it: She ducked down and stared. Maggie was stretched around an oval already the size of Kara’s palm, wet with blood and mucus and covered with fine hair. As she watched, a thick trickle of blood ran along the edge where the head pushed insistently against its confinement.

“I have to push,” Maggie gasped.

“You do,” Dr. Hamilton confirmed briskly. She was watching behind Kara’s shoulder. “When you feel the next contraction, bear down along with it.”

A few tense breaths, and then with a groaning scream Maggie pushed once—and a small person’s head popped out, eyes closed, face scrunched.

Kara shrieked in surprise. Just behind her, Dr. Hamilton whooped. “Well done! Now neck and shoulders! Do that again with the next contraction.”

Maggie felt between her legs again, this time tracing her baby’s face. She laughed with joy. Then, as another contraction took her, she bit her lip and gave a powerful, ragged shout, and the shoulders were out.

“Incredible,” the doctor said. “Again, Maggie. You’re almost there.”

Maggie was running her fingertips over the baby’s emerging body in wonder. “Alex,” she said breathlessly. “Kara.” They never found out what she wanted to say to them; one more contraction crashed through her, she gave one more deep powerful push, and Tav Kar-El’s entire body slid free of hers, into her hands.


	15. Chapter 15

The babies changed everything. They had all known they would, of course. They were ready for everything to change—the rhythms of their days, the things they thought about, the things that felt important.

Sex changed. Not so much what they wanted, or how much they wanted each other, but there were new constraints on what was available and possible. 

For a while it seemed like they were never going to have sex again. They were too tired— mostly too tired even to talk about it. Someone was always nursing at least one of the insatiable infants, and whoever wasn’t feeding or changing or calming or cleaning or washing (or battling an alien predator or, after a few weeks, going to work) was collapsed on a bed or a couch. All of them, even Kara, had long since passed into the watery, hallucinogenic sense-cave of sleep deprivation; none of them could navigate logically all the way through a complete sequence of thought, and if they did all happen to be conscious in the same room at the same time they were likely to be staring silently off in different directions.

Then one morning, the babies were miraculously sleeping simultaneously, and all three of them were more or less alert, and they found themselves sliding into one of their old favorites: Kara and Maggie had Alex between them, all three of them naked and luxuriating in the feel of each other’s skin, talking and touching, laughing about the day in front of them. Without any of them saying anything, the touching intensified, the talking fell away. Alex, facing Kara, put her thigh deliberately up onto Kara’s hip, opening herself for Kara’s hand; at the same time, she pushed her hips back into Maggie’s.

“Are you sure?” Kara murmured. She hadn’t made love to Alex—or Maggie either—since the babies were born. 

“Oh yes,” Alex answered, definitive.

“Mmm, yes,” Maggie echoed into Alex’s neck as she kissed and nipped her, sliding her hand up Alex’s side to cup her breast gently in her palm. When Kara ducked her head to Alex’s other breast, she ran her fingers into Kara’s hair and warned, “Careful, babe.” She was intimately familiar with the sensations of a nursed-on nipple, and they weren’t exactly sexy.

“Yeah,” Alex said, pushing Kara’s head from her breast, “not that, honey, not now.”

“But they’re so beautiful,” Kara complained. She kissed the swells of each breast in turn and said sadly, “I always love them but right now ...” She trailed off, speechless. Raising herself up on an elbow, she reached for Maggie’s breast, brushing her fingertips over the curve. 

“Nope,” Maggie warned, “off limits.” The tender touch of Kara’s fingers actually felt nice, but she knew that if it developed any further, it wouldn’t.

The brokenhearted look on Kara’s face as she stared at the extra-rounded, extra-ample, extra-delicious-looking feast in front of her would have weakened any resolve that wasn’t reinforced by hours of having tiny, insistent mouths attached to some of its most sensitive parts. “No,” Alex and Maggie said simultaneously.

“Sorry, love,” Alex said, kissing Kara with genuine regret. “But I’ve got plenty of other places that are extremely eager for your attention.” She took Kara’s hand and guided it between her legs.

“Oh. Wow. Yes,” Kara breathed. She moved her fingers through the soft wetness delicately at first, skimming and brushing until Alex groaned and thrust against her; then she firmed her touch, exploring, refamiliarizing. “You feel so good,” she rasped, letting all of her attention focus on her fingertips. 

“God, Kara,” Alex panted. “Please.”

“Patience,” Kara said, touching Alex’s lips with fingers slick from her own cunt. “Keep her ready for me, Maggie.”

Maggie chuckled into the ear in front of her lips and slid her hands down Alex’s thighs. She pulled and rolled back, bringing Alex partly on top of her, and got her hands behind Alex’s knees; she dug her fingers in and lifted, spreading Alex’s legs. 

Kara drew back just enough to look down Alex’s body and appreciate the beauty of the swollen pink flesh between her legs. Alex reached blindly, both hands behind her head, and tangled her fingers in Maggie’s hair; her lips were moving and she was making sounds, desperate semi-words that neither Kara nor Maggie needed to understand. Then Kara’s fingers went back to work, the wet smacks loud in the space she held between them. She circled the entrance to Alex’s body, slowly and gently at first, then harder, and faster, and harder. Alex groaned and thrust and struggled against Maggie’s grip, though she didn’t want to be released. 

“Please,” she panted at last, breaking down just the way Maggie and Kara wanted her to.

Kara smiled with delight and slid two fingers into her, and Maggie laughed out loud at Alex’s grateful groan. 

“How’s that, babe?” Kara asked, working deep inside her. 

“Oh God, so good,” Alex answered hoarsely. Being fucked was different, once again—different than it had been during her pregnancy and not quite what it had been before she’d been pregnant—but wonderful. She felt softer and more open, and Kara’s fingers felt harder and more insistent, building a sweet ache at the center of her body with their rhythmic pumping.

Kara kissed her breastbone, her collarbone, her neck; Maggie bit her shoulder, tongued her ear, slid one hand onto her clit; and Alex was clutched in the lightning-fast, thunder-deep pulse that she hadn’t felt for weeks. 

When she stopped them with a weak hand, she could feel tears trickling from the corners of her eyes. Kara kissed them away, murmuring in Kryptahniuo, while Maggie drew her wet fingers over Alex’s hips and ribs and slowly, slowly nosed and rubbed against her shoulders. 

They lay together, breathing each other in, touching with trailing fingers, giving tiny soft kisses—

And a baby wailed piteously, one room away.

“Shit shit goddam fuck goddam,” Alex said bitterly.

Maggie sighed. “It’s Tav,” she said, resigned. “My boobs just started to leak.”

Kara pushed herself up and swung out of the bed. “I’ll get ’em,” she said cheerfully. “Hey, it’s more than we’ve had for weeks, right?”

“Right.” Maggie didn’t sound cheerful at all.

 

 

Jul and Tav also changed things that none of them would have connected to a baby.

When they were about six months old, Alex came home with a massive metal lockbox so heavy that it tasked even her substantial strength to lug it into the house.

Maggie, from the couch in the front living room that they all called the study for no particular reason, asked in puzzlement, “What the hell is that?”

Alex said shortly, “Gun safe.”

Kara was on the floor in front of Maggie, racing the babies. She put a brightly colored toy a few feet away, then set them on their bellies and watched with delight as they both struggled toward it (or, just as often, rolled onto their backs, wriggled in a different direction entirely, started to cry, or fell asleep). She glanced up at Maggie, who wore an expression of surprise.

“A gun safe? Really?” Maggie queried. “I’m pretty sure that when I mentioned getting a gun safe you said, ‘The only place my gun is safe is in my hand.’ ” 

“It’s a California law,” Alex said. “We have to have our guns locked up if they’re someplace where they might be accessible to minors.”

“And you’ve suddenly started paying attention to California law because ... ?”

“I don’t want our guns lying around the house, okay?” Alex snapped. “We have children now. And yes, of course, they aren’t playing with anything more complicated than a teething ring right now, but someday they will, and even though they might be bulletproof we don’t know that, and they’ll have friends, and ...”

“Okay, babe,” Maggie said pacifically, holding up her hands. “Kids plus guns equals Alex freakout. Check.”

“I’m not freaking out,” Alex said through her teeth. 

Neither Kara nor Maggie said anything, or looked at Alex, or looked at each other.

After a moment Alex said, “Okay, yes. I’m freaking out.” She sat down heavily on the couch next to Maggie and watched Tav and Jul push up on their chubby arms, kick their legs, and thump back to the floor.

“They’re so perfect,” Alex said, so low that Maggie had to strain to hear. “They’re so wonderful and ... perfect, and I just don’t want anything bad to come anywhere near them. Ever.” 

Maggie reached out and touched Alex’s hair. “We’re going to protect them, Alex. With everything we have.”

Alex shook her head, her brow furrowing. “I’m not even talking about keeping them safe, Maggie. I’m talking about keeping them—pure.”

Maggie cocked her head on one side, signaling her confusion, unsure where Alex was going with this. Alex kept her eyes on the babies, a look of longing on her face.

Kara nodded her head. “I know what you mean, Alex,” she said. “Right now, they don’t even know that people hurt other people. Everything about the world is good.”

Jul spit up on the carpet.

“Well, almost everything,” Kara conceded, leaning over with a towel.

An expression of pain flickered briefly around Alex’s eyes and mouth. “It just seems as if a gun— _my_ gun—is a distillation of all the ugly shit we deal with all day.” She raised her hands in helplessness, then let them fall to her knees. “They’ve always felt like a tool to help do something decent, you know? A way to bring some order into the world. And now—” She huffed out a breath. “I don’t even want to look at the damn things.”

Kara picked up the nearest baby and handed them up to Alex. “Here,” she said. “Snuggle.”

Alex nestled the little body into her arms, put her cheek to the soft head and nuzzled, breathing in the smell of organic shampoo and diaper cream and baby. “Mmm,” she hummed appreciatively.

“It’s a good idea in any case,” Maggie said softly. “The gun safe.”

Alex nodded against the baby’s temple, her eyes half shut.

The gun safe went into the hallway on the second floor—an unusual interior decoration choice, but no visitor was ever so foolish as to mention it. It was just outside Alex’s workroom, where she could access it nearly instantly. She added a thumbprint lock so that it opened at a touch (her touch, or Maggie’s), and of course she ran drills so that the new location of the weapons trove became second nature. As the kids got older, the metal exterior received dents and scratches from skateboards illicitly ridden and swordfights illicitly fought in the hallway, and they gradually covered it with glittery stickers of fairies and spaceships. It was as central and unremarkable an object as the refrigerator or the bathtub.

Alex put her guns in it every night for the rest of her life.

 

 

Another morning, not long afterward, Maggie came downstairs carrying a freshly changed Tav with a peculiar expression on her face.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

Glance between Alex and Kara.

“I just said something—I was changing Tav and as soon as I put their butt on the new diaper, they pooped all over.”

“Gross.” Kara wrinkled her nose. She was already looking forward to toilet training.

“Yeah, well. The thing that came out of my mouth was ‘ _¡Eh ave maría!_ ’ ”

“Which means ... ?”

“It’s just ‘Ave Maria.’ Hail Mary. The prayer. But it’s something my mom used to say all the time. And the way I said it—it was her tone, her inflection, her everything.” Maggie sat down, still looking shell-shocked. “I just heard my mother’s voice come out of my mouth. I don’t know what to think about that.”

Neither Alex nor Kara said anything for a long moment. The same experience for either of them, channeling Eliza, would have been hilarious; for Maggie, it was ten kinds of fraught. Then Alex said, “Do you know what you feel about it?”

Maggie blinked. “Terrified? Angry? Sad?” Every word was a question. Then she said, more decisively, “Nostalgic, I guess. With all the feelings that are attached to that. Bad and good.”

Alex nodded. “All the shit you felt when you were a kid. Missing it, and being glad it’s gone, and knowing you can’t go back.”

Maggie added, “Yearning, but ...”

Kara said quietly, “Guilty.”

Maggie’s breath caught. She gave a sharp nod but didn’t speak.

Kara and Alex had talked a lot about Maggie’s relationship with her family, or lack of one. She was in intermittent contact with some of her siblings; she had sent a stilted, formal letter to her mother when she’d learned she was pregnant, and her mother had sent a stilted, formal letter back. She hadn’t spoken to her father in nineteen years. Kara had hesitantly wondered if they, she and Alex, ought to encourage or even arrange more contact; Alex, after much discussion, had opined firmly that they shouldn’t. But both of them thought that Maggie’s estrangement from her family reflected something even bigger and deeper than the contact she didn’t have with those particular people, and signaled even greater damage.

Maggie rarely spoke Spanish, never even alluded to the Catholicism she’d been raised in. Alex knew, because she’d asked, that Maggie’s mother was Colombian and her father Mexican, and that they’d met in the States. But nothing more. Maggie didn’t talk about her family traditions, almost never shared family memories, didn’t observe holidays or search out foods from her childhood. She might know, intellectually, that the world she’d grown up in had betrayed her, but Alex and Kara both figured that Maggie _felt_ as if she’d betrayed that world. A lesbian, a cop, and now, part of a family with two white women.

Not twenty-four hours later, they found her sitting at the kitchen table staring at her phone as if it were a demon. She looked up as they came in and said, “You have to hear this.”

She held up her phone. The speaker played back what was obviously a voicemail, a man’s voice, the message spoken with many hesitations. 

_“Margarita, es tu padre. Estoy llamando desde el teléfono de su hermana.”_

Maggie translated in an inflectionless voice: “It’s your father. I’m calling on your sister’s phone.”

_“Sé que quizá no desee oír mi voz.”_

“I know you might not want to hear my voice.” 

_“Quiero—quiero—todos los días, lamento lo que hice. Estoy orgulloso de ti, que has encontrado una vida feliz.”_

“Every day, I regret what I did. I’m proud of you, that you found a happy life.”

_“Espero que algún día puedas perdonarme.”_

“I hope someday you can forgive me.” 

A long pause—was he trying to think of something more to say?—and the message ended.

After a moment, Alex asked gently, “Do you want to call him back?”

Maggie thought about it, looking at the phone in her hand as if it could tell her. “Not yet,” she said at last. “But sometime. Maybe.” 

A couple of hours later Kara found her standing in one of the large front windows, holding Tav tucked under her chin, staring out unseeing into the street. Kara came up behind her and drew her close against her, putting her head on Maggie’s shoulder and her hands on Maggie’s hips.

“You okay?” she asked.

Maggie didn’t answer directly. She continued to look out into the street and, clearly, into a landscape far beyond. At last she said, “When I was a kid, my family used to spend two weeks every summer at a cottage on a lake a couple hours away in Missouri.”

Kara stopped breathing. This was the first childhood story Maggie had ever voluntarily told her.

“The lake was really shallow,” Maggie went on, “and the place we rented had trees right down to the water, so the bottom of the lake where we swam was all covered in fallen leaves. There wasn’t anything wrong with them, nothing dangerous, but they were kind of slimy on your feet, you know? So every year, we’d get out of the car and run down to the lakeshore and into the water, and right away we’d start yelling for our dad to rake the leaves off the bottom of the lake.” She smiled faintly and shook her head. “Rake the leaves off the bottom of the lake,” she repeated. “And you know what? He did. Every single year.”

Kara smiled into Maggie’s shoulder and pushed forward just far enough to kiss Tav’s tiny head. 

Maggie leaned her head back into Kara, letting her gaze drift up to the ceiling. “He’s a shit,” she said finally. “But he was a great dad.”

“That’s why it hurts that he’s a shit,” Kara said softly into Maggie’s shoulder.

“Kara Danvers,” Maggie said, fake-outraged, “you said shit.”

“Ten bucks to the swear jar,” Kara murmured. “Totally worth it.”

“We only charge Alex a quarter,” Maggie laughed, the moment’s tension relaxing into play.

“Because we’d bankrupt her otherwise.”

It was a long while before Maggie responded to her father, and she did it with a letter, not a call (“He’s right,” she told Alex and Kara, “I don’t want to hear his voice”). It was a long while after that before Ed Sawyer (né Eduardo Suarez) rang their bell, nervous and hopeful—he had more than one grandchild from his troubled, troubling, _maravillosa_ Margarita by then, but he was determined to be the first of his family to meet them, no matter how humble he had to make himself to do it.

 

 

The most profound effect, perhaps, was on Kara.

It was only a couple of weeks after Tav was born that Kara came down from the roof deck where she would occasionally land if she was under duress. She was still scratched and bruised, her suit torn and singed and looking like hell, and she collapsed to her knees next to the bed where Maggie lay nursing both the babies, one in each arm. (Maggie, it had turned out, was a champion lactator. She easily produced twice as much as even Tav’s half-Kryptonian metabolism needed, so when Alex was out, she would feed both Tav and Jul. Since this meant that she wasn’t uncomfortably swollen with breastmilk and Alex never had to go near a breast pump, it worked out for everyone, though Maggie had warned both of her lovers that if either of them let the words “wet nurse” escape their mouths, destruction would be dealt.)

“Rough day?” Maggie asked, raising an eyebrow. 

Kara just nodded and put a hand up, touching Maggie’s leg. 

The front door opened downstairs and they heard Alex’s voice: “Kara? You up there?”

Kara sighed and said, just loud enough for Alex to hear in deference to the infants, “Up in the bedroom.”

Alex appeared at the door a few moments later, concern in her face.

“So,” Maggie said, “are either of you going to tell me what happened?”

There was a long pause, and Kara and Alex looked at each other. 

“Tough mission,” Alex said at last. “But everyone’s okay.”

“No thanks to me,” Kara said.

“All thanks to you,” Alex corrected swiftly. 

Kara shook her head. “It doesn’t feel that way.”

“It still is that way,” Alex pressed. When Kara simply looked away, Alex went on, “ _You_ took a bomb blast, Kara. No one else was hurt.”

Kara was still slowly shaking her head. “I hesitated, Alex. I didn’t go in on the signal.”

Alex gestured to the heavens. “Yeah. You didn’t storm ahead without any regard for anyone’s safety. It’s not a bug, Kara, it’s a feature.”

“I just—I never did that before, Alex. I never thought twice about—”

“Kara, think about what you actually did,” Alex interrupted. “You scanned through the door instead of kicking it down. You saw the explosives, you moved everybody back. And then you absorbed the blast yourself. What exactly is there to criticize in that?”

“I hesitated,” Kara repeated. “I don’t _do_ that, Alex. What’s wrong with me?” She moved her hand, perhaps unconsciously, from Maggie’s leg to the foot of the baby closest to her.

“You’re learning something?” Alex said, exasperated.

Kara was silent, stroking the baby’s arch with her thumb until the tiny leg lifted away.

Alex sighed. “Look, Kara, I realize that you think—”

“I was _afraid_ ,” Kara spat.

Alex stopped short, her mouth still open.

“I’ve never been afraid,” Kara said. “Well, almost never. Not ever for myself. But I went up to that door and all I could think about was, I have to stay alive. Tav and Jul need me to be alive. I can’t die here.” Her voice was steady, if rough, but a tear trickled down her cheek.

There was a long silent beat. Finally Maggie said, “You were right. You do need to stay alive.”

Both Alex and Kara looked at her, Alex in silent agreement, Kara uncomprehending.

“You do,” Maggie reiterated firmly. “You don’t get to leave your children, Kara. No one else can give them what they need. Not Alex, not me.”

“But how can I be effective—” Kara started.

“You’re not listening, Kara,” Alex interjected. “You were better today because you thought twice. _Better._ Think for a second what would have happened if you’d just kicked in the door. Sure, you might have shielded the agents behind you from the explosion. Maybe. Or maybe I’d be spending my afternoon visiting my team’s families and telling them their son or daughter or husband or wife was never coming home.” Alex slid to the floor next to Kara and grabbed her shoulder. “I’ve done enough of that for ten lifetimes.”

Kara let her head fall to the side, onto Alex’s hand, and Alex pushed her fingers into Kara’s hair.

“I’ve been trying to teach you this for years,” Alex muttered, stroking Kara’s temple with her thumb. 

“And just think, all you had to do was have her baby,” Maggie cracked.

Though Kara still fought as if she were fearless, still stepped into danger as if she were willing to sacrifice herself, she wasn’t. She never would be again. She waited for backup; she took an extra moment to be sure. It made her more dangerous, and it made Alex and Maggie—and Eliza, and J’onn, and Winn, and James, and Lena, and every one of the many other people who loved her—sleep easier at night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Many thanks to my friend Virginia for a native speaker’s help with Ed’s Spanish. If mistakes remain, they are entirely mine.  
> 2) I have never been to and have no personal knowledge of Big Lake in Missouri; the vignette Maggie recounts is based one hundred percent on the lake I grew up swimming in, which my dad patiently raked for me, for real, and which I now somewhat less patiently rake for my own kid.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had not originally planned this part of the tale (who am I kidding, I hadn’t originally _planned_ any of it), but lately Supercorp has seemed like the radical and disruptive Supergirl ship. Can’t think why. So Kara becomes an even busier girl, and we all get an extra chapter.

As in almost every house, the Kar-Els’ family life was centered in the kitchen. The eastern house—technically, on the deed, Maggie and Alex’s house—was shaded in the afternoon by the giant spreading oak in the middle of the backyard, but it had the morning sun so that was where they’d put the kitchen. Coffee and breakfast tended to be there, lunch and dinner through the open archway in the living and dining area next door. 

This was an ordinary late weekend morning. The babies were having their first nap, and their three as-always exhausted mothers were sitting in the sun at one end of the long wooden table. Kara had been shifty and nervous all day; Alex and Maggie had silently agreed to let her bring up on her own whatever it was she needed to tell them.

As they moved from coffee to tea, Kara broke.

“I have something to talk about with you guys, but I’m not really sure how to talk about it. Because we never have, but we haven’t said we wouldn’t, in fact we kind of implied we would, but it wasn’t something we agreed on either.” Kara somehow managed to fidget with her entire body while not actually moving at all. As she talked, her eyes got bigger and bigger, as if imploring them for rescue.

Alex frowned. “Kara, what are you talking about?”

Maggie tried to catch Alex’s eye, but before she could say anything Kara had surged on: “So there’s a ... thing, between me and ... and I want to know if ... No, wait, that’s not the right place to start. I’m really happy. You know that, right? I’m really, really happy with you both. I love our family. I love you so much.” She looked like she was about to cry.

Alex was beginning to show signs of panic on top of her confusion. She reached for Kara’s shoulder. “Kara, baby, what’s wrong? You can tell us anything, you know that—”

Maggie gently, gently placed a finger on Alex’s lips, drawing the confused look to herself. She smiled reassuringly at Alex, then looked over at Kara with tender amusement. “Who is it?”

Kara and Alex both said, “What?”

Maggie smiled wider. “You met somebody, Kara, right? Somebody you’d like to get involved with, or at least have sex with.” Kara’s shock at Maggie’s bluntness was evident, but she didn’t deny it; if anything, the deep blush confirmed it. Maggie glanced at Alex, whose mouth was hanging open slightly. “Come on, Alex, do you not remember Kara’s seventeen minutes of constant incomprehensible rambling to ask us to use a vibrator on her? Whatever she was going on about, it was about sex. And I couldn’t understand what she was after any more than you could, but I could sure tell that she wasn’t talking about anything between the three of us.”

Alex turned her head slowly to focus on Kara. Kara, for her part, looked at a point a few inches above Alex’s head and turned bright red.

“Okay, Kara,” Alex said. “Okay. Who is it?”

Kara just squeaked.

Alex looked at Maggie, raised her eyebrows, and shrugged. Maggie asked patiently, “Is it a woman?”

Kara nodded.

“That’s good,” Maggie said. “Someone we know?”

Kara nodded again, looking haunted.

“Do you want her to be part of—” Alex waved her hand vaguely, indicating herself, Maggie, the house—their family.

“No, no,” Kara said, shaking her head vigorously. “She knows about everything, but I don’t think she’d want to, even though I think she thinks it’s kind of great.”

“It’s Lena, isn’t it,” Maggie announced with certainty.

Kara, who had begun to recover from her blushing, blushed again. “Um, maybe?”

Alex let her head fall onto the back of the chair. “Lena Luthor? You’re _kidding_.”

Kara scowled. “Don’t be nasty, Alex. Lena is a wonderful person and she’s been my best friend for—”

“I _like_ Lena,” Alex interrupted. “I respect her. And, wow, of course I understand being attracted to her. It’s just, holy complications, Batman.”

Kara’s scowl deepened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“As in, she is a rather public figure, Kara,” Alex said earnestly. “The point of the existence of ‘Kara Danvers’ is so that you can have an identity that no one pays attention to, right? So if you’re going to be dating the richest woman in National City, who happens also to be its most visible philanthropist, and a favorite target of the gossip columnists and the paparazzi—”

Maggie smirked. “I don’t think Kara said anything about dating.”

Alex rolled her eyes. “This is _Kara_ , Mags. Kara can’t walk our neighbors’ dog while they’re out of town without getting attached, much less sleep with her best friend.”

Kara said petulantly, “I’m right here, guys. How about you talk to me and not just about me?”

Maggie eyed her piercingly. “Alex has a point. You aren’t exactly a no-strings-sex kind of girl.”

“I know that,” Kara exclaimed. “I can’t be. And I wouldn’t want to be if I could, certainly not with Lena, which is why this is a whole _thing_ we have to _discuss_ and not just an announcement.”

Alex and Maggie were both struck silent for a long moment. Finally Maggie raised her coffee mug in salute. “Very true, Kara Zor-El. Well said.”

“So,” Kara said, slightly mollified. “Alex, you think it’s a terrible idea.”

“I think it’s a complicated idea,” Alex muttered. “I think you could blow your cover, which would mean blowing the babies’ cover.”

“Ouch,” Maggie said. “Low blow, Danvers. Bringing the babies into it?” She peered into the corner of the kitchen, where Jul and Tav were peacefully curled up together in the Pack ’n’ Play, fast asleep.

“I’m not using the babies as a rhetorical device,” Alex argued. “They’re my concern. If it gets out that there are half-Kryptonian kids in this house—”

“I don’t think it’s a given that it will, even if Kara and Lena make the papers,” Maggie countered. “According to every public record, you and I live in one of these houses with our kids, and Kara lives next door. You and I are legally married, we’re the legal parents of the children. There’s nothing there that should be interesting to a reporter. So Kara lives next door to her sister. Big deal. All the guardianship paperwork that gives Kara parental rights, the health care proxies, our Kryptonian bonding, that’s all private. We constructed it that way, remember?”

Alex nodded. 

Kara burst out, “That isn’t what I was concerned about. I don’t know how we got sidetracked into this.”

Alex and Maggie looked at her, mildly confused. “What are you concerned about, then?” Alex asked.

Kara stared at her. “I’m talking,” she said slowly and clearly, “about sleeping with another person. About sharing the body that you share with someone else.”

“Oh, whatever,” Alex waved her hand dismissively. “I don’t care about _that_. Or, no—wait.” She paused and knit her brow contemplatively. “I do care, of course. I care that you’re happy, and that you’re safe. I trust Lena with that. And I care that you are still committed to me and to Maggie and the kids. But I know you are. I’m not worried about that, I’m really not.”

Maggie took Kara’s hand across the table. “We know you’re always going to come home,” she said. 

“And we know you need more than we can be,” Alex added. “We’ve always all known that.”

Kara looked at them both, turning her eyes from one to the other, her smile bright enough to explain the tears in her eyes. “I chose well,” she murmured.

“We all did,” Maggie confirmed. “Now, give us the dish. Lena? What happened? You’ve been best friends for years and now suddenly you want in her pants?”

“Well,” Kara began, growing more enthusiastic with every phrase, “I can’t say it’s suddenly. I mean I’ve always been, like, Rao, Lena’s so beautiful, and it’s always been a little hard to look and not touch, right? The other night we were in her office really late, like we are sometimes, hanging out, and she went in the bathroom and took her bra off. She made a kind of joke about letting herself go free after hours, and she was wearing this sheer blouse that concealed absolutely nothing, and I—” Kara traced a little breast-shaped curve in the air. “I touched.”

“Oh my God,” Alex and Maggie chorused simultaneously, then cracked up. 

“Smooth, Zor-El,” Maggie added. “You grabbed her boob?”

“I didn’t _grab_ ,” Kara protested. “I _touched_. Respectfully.”

“Oh my God,” Alex said again, clutching her head. “I’m somehow back to being sixteen and completely grossed out that my little sister could possibly be having any sexual thoughts whatsoever.”

“Except about you,” Maggie pointed out.

Alex rolled her eyes and shrugged. “Touché.”

Kara frowned. “Does that mean that you don’t want me to—”

“No, no,” Alex said hastily. “I just mean, I don’t need the details.”

“I might need the details,” Maggie said thoughtfully. “Later.”

“So,” Kara said, overly casually, “if you don’t have anything more, I’ll probably just go ... hang out ...”

“You’re going to go fuck Lena Luthor’s brains out,” Maggie corrected, somewhat brutally.

Kara shut her eyes for a moment, then answered, “Probably. Assuming she wants to.”

“So, yes,” Alex confirmed. At Kara’s incredulous glance, Alex said, “I’ve seen the way she looks at you!”

“Like what?” Kara asked.

“Like she hasn’t eaten for a week, and you’re a steak,” Maggie supplied.

Kara blushed. “I’ve never noticed anything like that.”

“You wouldn’t,” grumbled Alex. Abruptly she stood up and, stepping around the table, pulled Kara up too, into a rough, tight hug. “I love you,” she said into Kara’s ear. Then she loosened her hold and pulled back enough to look Kara in the face. “Go,” she said with a smile.

Kara held her eyes for a long moment, and they filled each other with wordless reassurance. “I love you too,” Kara said at last, low and fierce. She looked over at Maggie. “Both of you.”

“Go!” Maggie ordered, laughing, and Kara went.

 

 

That night as they drifted toward sleep, spooning loosely, Alex said into the back of Maggie’s neck, “Should that have been a bigger deal? Should we have talked about it more?”

“What?” Maggie asked.

“Kara. And Lena. Kara seeing someone else. I mean, when the three of us all started out together, we talked and talked and _talked_ for weeks, don’t you remember?”

“And fucked,” Maggie reminded her, yawning. “We fucked a lot.”

Alex laughed. “Yeah, we did. Now that I think about it, the sex came before the talking with us, too.”

“Before most of the talking, anyway.” Maggie paused. “Is there something more you want to say to her? Or me?”

Alex thought. “No,” she said slowly. “It just feels strange that there doesn’t seem to be more we need to say, when this is objectively a really big deal.”

Maggie rolled onto her back so that she could see Alex’s face. “I know what you mean,” she said. “It feels more like changing the paint color in the living room.”

“No,” Alex protested, “we argued for _days_ about the paint color in the living room.”

“Fair point,” Maggie said. “But you know what I mean.”

“I do,” Alex nodded. She shifted up onto her elbow to look down at Maggie, who looked back up at her with a muted version of the same amazed adoration that they had both been so drunk on when they first got together.

Alex ran a finger lightly over Maggie’s brow, down her nose, over her lips, pulling away playfully when Maggie tried to take the pad of her finger into her mouth. “Maybe the strangest thing,” Alex said finally, watching Maggie’s expression, “is that I feel completely okay with Kara doing this, but I really don’t want ...” She hesitated but pushed herself on: “... you to.”

Maggie nodded, her eyes soft, and she reached up and put her hand on Alex’s cheek. They held there for a moment, connecting themselves with hands and eyes, and then Maggie said, “I feel the same way. I don’t want to share you, except with Kara. Not now. Maybe not ever.”

Alex puffed out a relieved breath. “Oh, good,” she said. “I was afraid that wouldn’t seem fair.”

“Maybe it isn’t,” Maggie mused. “Who cares? Is it important that it’s fair, or that we all get what we want?”

“Maggie,” Alex said, “stop being so smart,” and she rolled onto her and put her thigh between Maggie’s, where they fitted together so perfectly, and she laced her fingers into Maggie’s and held her hands down, and they didn’t talk again for a long time.

 

 

Kara untied the soft ropes that bound Lena’s wrists to the posts of her bed, kissing the red marks that blossomed where Lena had strained against—no, _into_ her captivity. She went on, gently tracing with her tongue the bruises and bite marks she’d left elsewhere: on Lena’s shoulders, breasts, belly, the insides of her thighs. 

Lena sighed heavily, sated and sleepy, and ran her fingers through Kara’s hair as she mapped Lena’s body and the evidence of her command of it. She smiled as Kara nosed between her legs and shifted, half-aroused and all exhausted, as a curious tongue dipped tentatively between her lips, grazing her clit. “Oh, Kara, I can’t,” she breathed. “Really. You can’t. Not again.”

Kara made a noise combining disappointment and challenge.

“If you keep going you aren’t going to be able to fuck me again for a week,” Lena warned, and that did it: Kara lifted her head and nibbled her way back up Lena’s body. 

She gathered Lena into her arms, nuzzling her gently, quiet and soothing after the whirlwind that she had been only a few minutes ago, when she’d pinned Lena’s hips down with one powerful forearm while she pumped her fingers into her furiously. She’d been following Lena’s instructions, true, but she’d followed instructions with relish. It was utterly unexpected, how much she’d loved having Lena give herself up so completely to her mercy, what a turn-on it had been to show her none. For a time they had both been caught up thoroughly in the moment they’d created, dominator and dominated, ravisher and ravished. The room still rang with Lena’s cries and Kara’s growls. 

Lena had come, and Kara had not even slowed inside her, and Lena had rolled into what might have been a second orgasm but might have been the long, sweet tail of the first; then she’d tried to pull her legs up and twist away, but Kara hadn’t allowed it, she’d just kept fucking her and fucking her, and Lena had sobbed with how powerless she was and how good it felt and how there was nothing she could do, nothing, but be a body taken and used for her own pleasure.

And then, when the pleasure-pain began to creep over the thin line into pain, she had whispered once, softly, “Red, baby,” and Kara had stilled instantly, pulled out of her slowly, her eyes searching for Lena’s safety and comfort as intensely as they had been watching her terror and ecstasy a moment before.

“Wait till I tie up my superhero,” Lena said, “and ride her into the ground.” Her voice was full of anticipatory glee. 

“You think I’m going to let you do that?” Kara teased.

“Yes,” Lena said. “Yes, I do.” Her eyes gleamed. “I think you’re going to get onto your elbows and knees with your face in the mattress, and I’m going to put stripes on that beautiful back while you beg me to go after your cunt.” Her voice changed, deepening and hoarsening, as she went on, “And I will.”

She worked her fingers into the messy ponytail Kara had thrown her hair into, and pulled Kara’s head back, exposing her throat. With her teeth at Kara’s jugular she said, “I’m going to wreck you, Kara Zor-El. Have you been fisted, Kara? I bet you’ll love that. Do you think your aorosh would take a clamp? With a chain, maybe?” 

Kara shivered. 

“I’m going to fuck that virgin ass of yours,” Lena went on.

“Hey, I never told you—”

“You didn’t have to.”

Kara laughed and rolled over to the side, pulling Lena on top of her. Lena curled into her, nuzzling her head under Kara’s chin and covering her chest and shoulder with a blanket of silky dark hair. 

Kara kissed the top of Lena’s head and said, “Do you think it’s weird that I don’t want to have sex like this with Alex or Maggie?”

“I think it’s fortunate,” Lena answered into Kara’s sternum. “All the more for me.”

“It’s not like they wouldn’t,” Kara mused, her hands splayed out on Lena’s back. “I know they do, in fact. They’ve told me. They asked me if I wanted to, and I thought about it, but it just didn’t feel—I didn’t want to.” 

“I feel very special that I’m the only one you want to tie up and abuse,” Lena said, the grin clear in her voice.

“Is it weird that I’m talking about my other lovers while I’m in bed with you?”

“Yes,” Lena said, nodding. “But not bad weird. Good weird, I think.” She turned her head and shifted so that she was stretched out on Kara, belly to belly, facing her again. “We do have to talk about—everything. We can’t pretend your family doesn’t exist.”

“I wouldn’t,” Kara protested, shocked.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Lena agreed. “I wouldn’t be here with you if you did. If you _could_.” She paused thoughtfully, giving little kisses to Kara’s breastbone, and then she went on, “It’s funny, how much I trust you. That knowing you have two other partners, primary partners, makes me trust you more, not less.”

Kara was silent for a moment, and then she said seriously, “I’ll always protect you as well as I can, Lena. And I’ll never lie to you.” She added self-deprecatingly, “After all, when I thought I was lying to you, you thought I was playing some kind of sophisticated ironic game, so ...”

Lena laughed. “You’re not really built for it, it’s true.” She sobered abruptly. “Are you ready to think about what this could become?” she asked, with a hint of uncertainty. “You said it wasn’t casual, and that’s not what I want either. But I don’t want to be absorbed into your harem, either. I like Alex and Maggie but ...”

“No, no,” Kara said hastily. “I’d never pressure you into that. This is different, Lena. It’s a different thing entirely.”

“How much of a thing?” Lena put her hands on either side of Kara’s body and raised up, arching her back, so that she could look Kara full in the face. “I don’t need you twenty-four-seven, Kara. I couldn’t be there for you twenty-four-seven if you wanted that much of me. But I need you to be ...”

“Committed?” Kara asked, her eyes steady on Lena’s. 

Lena hesitated a moment, thinking about that, and then nodded. “Committed.”

“You and I, we’re a family too,” Kara whispered. “Not the same kind of family. But not less.”

Lena turned her head again and lay back on Kara’s chest, abruptly. After a moment, Kara felt a hot, wet drop on her breastbone, and she ran her hands soothingly from Lena’s shoulders down her spine and back up.

Lena relaxed, the tension she was still holding melting away. “Good,” she murmured. “That’s good.”

When Kara was sure that Lena had dozed off, she kissed the top of her head. “Whatever kind of family you want, Lena,” she said softly. “I’ll be there.” She smiled into Lena’s hair. “I have a lot of energy.”

 

 

A few weeks later David Penobscot, who lived in the house on the other side of Kara’s, approached her apologetically while she was watering her flowers in front. “I hate to tell you this, because you’ve been such a great neighbor—”

Kara, spooked, mentally finished his sentence with _“but we didn’t expect to have to live next to a lesbian orgy and its devil spawn!”_ before he went on with something quite different.

“—but we’re selling the house.”

“Oh, David! I’m so sorry. What happened? I thought you and Carolyn wanted to retire in that house!”

“More that we expected the house to finance our retirement,” he laughed. “Now that the kids are grown and gone, we really don’t need that much space, and frankly, we got an offer we couldn’t refuse. About half again what it’s worth right now. Even if we held on for another fifteen years and the house continued to appreciate, it wouldn’t be as advantageous as it would be to take the money now.” He shrugged. “I hope L-Corp will be a good neighbor to you too.”

“L-Corp?” Kara asked faintly.

“The woman I spoke to said that the company is looking for property in this area to house visiting executives,” David explained. 

Kara just nodded, wide-eyed.

“Which makes sense,” David went on. “It’s a nice safe neighborhood, not far from downtown, great restaurants that deliver—all the reasons you moved here, right?” He laughed again, and Kara thought that she would miss his friendly laughter. She would certainly miss Carolyn’s fresh-baked bread, and she would miss their boxer, Wiggins. 

But she was going to have Lena right next door. (Have her, and have her, and have her.) And she had Alex and Maggie in this house and the house on the other side. “I’m going to have to start taking vitamins,” Kara muttered under her breath as she went back into the welcoming light of her family.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just one more to wrap up, and we’ll be done here, for now. I’ve enjoyed this world immensely and I would not rule out returning, but the tank is empty. Many thanks to all of the readers/kudosers/commenters—you have made this a joy.


	17. Epilogue and Postscript

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is at last, the lengthy, somewhat scattered end of this particular line. It’s taken me quite some time to get this out, partly because it was difficult to find a way to wrap it up, partly because I didn’t quite want to leave it. Thanks to all of you who have commented, subscribed, bookmarked, given kudos, or just read the thing. It’s been a fabulous journey.

## EPILOGUE

If one were aware of the many inimical forces at work in National City, then the bright, sweet, blue facade of the Super!School building might seem out of place. But even the most troubled of cities has room for a deeply well-intentioned, carefully curated private elementary school.

Room 102, the home of the Butterflies pre-K class, was sun-drenched and cheerful. On this, the first day of the school year, its chaos level was kept in check only through the seasoned supervision of Ms. Gwendolyn and Mr. Steve, the lead teachers of the Super!School’s threes-and-fours group.

Parents were always nervous leaving their children for the first time, but there was something extra going on with this one, Gwen reflected. You could hardly blame her. Her children were practically vibrating; three minutes in, they already promised to be this year’s extra-wild, extra-exuberant, extra-difficult, extra-adorable students.

“So Jul and Tav are both yours?” she asked the woman in front of her, who was watching as her four-year-olds plunged into the mayhem of the classroom. “Um ...” Gwen frowned at the roster, which was still stubbornly reporting a completely illogical set of facts. “Are they twins?”

Kara Danvers laughed merrily, jouncing a third child, a toddler who was no more than two, on her hip. “No, not exactly! Siblings, nine days apart. And believe me,” she rolled her eyes, “those were the longest nine days of my life.”

“I can imagine,” Gwen said, who couldn’t. 

Steve might have asked a question if he hadn’t been too flabbergasted to speak, but Kara noticed the look on his face and kindly clarified. “Different other moms,” she said. “I guess you’d call me the non-gestational parent. Tav is Maggie’s, and Jul is Alex’s. You’ll be meeting them at pickup.”

Steve nodded, but the look didn’t go away.

“We might have made things more confusing by making them all Kar-Els, but it seemed really important that the kids all have the same last name,” Kara went on confidingly, adjusting the baby on her hip. “We could have used Sanvers, you know, Sawyer and Danvers, but technically only Tav is a Sawyer-Danvers blend. And then this guy came along,” looking fondly at the child in her arm, “and _his_ other mom isn’t a Danvers or a Sawyer, so I was extra glad we hadn’t done that. She refused to inflict her last name on him, anyway. In fact, she picked Zan as his first name because Z is as far away as the English alphabet gets from L. So, anyway, they all have the name Kar-El.”

“Oh,” Gwen said faintly. She gathered herself and shot a look at Steve, who was watching the interaction with unconcealed fascination and relief. Well, she’d lost the scissors-paper-rock fair and square, so she was the one who had to ask the question. “One thing we were wondering. For some reason their registration paperwork doesn’t indicate—Are they boys or girls? Or boy and girl?”

“No,” Kara said.

“I’m sorry?” Gwen furrowed her brow.

“Not yet, anyway,” Kara said, turning to watch her kids knock down their carefully assembled magnet block tower. “Jul is usually a girl, and I think that’s where she’ll probably settle, but Tav, who knows. And on the days Jules is a boy, she’s really a boy. She’s very firm about it. No dresses, no princesses, no pink.”

Gwen tried to process this. “So ... how ... do ... we ...” she got out slowly. 

“Oh, she’ll tell you,” Kara explained offhandedly. “She comes down in the morning and says, ‘It’s a girl day, Ieiu,’ or ‘Boy day today.’ ” Then she rolled her eyes. “Tav’s another story. It’s pretty rare that they go all the way boy or girl, which makes the pronoun stuff very confusing. I wish English had a sensible singular gender-neutral pronoun, don’t you?”

“I sure do,” said Gwen, who had never even thought about the question but whose mind was already churning through all the ways the gender-indeterminate plural would make her life difficult. (Mostly in trying to get Steve to understand that _they_ might not refer to the entire classroom of children.)

“Now this one,” Kara said, gesturing at the dark-haired, luminous-eyed toddler who was trying to put a soggy pacifier down the front of her sensible button-down, “already acts like he’s going to be a boy. But who knows, really. And it’s all just such nonsense, of course.”

“Mmm hmm,” Gwen agreed. 

Kara returned her attention to the two children, one reddish-brown and one dark-haired, who had made themselves the center of the melee on the rainbow rug. “I thought they were going to grab onto my legs and refuse to let me go,” she said, a little wistfully. “But they’re both like, ‘Get out of here, Ieiu.’ ” She kissed the temple of the solemn cherub in her arms. “At least you still like me, Zan, right?”

Just then Tav sneezed, and several of the other kids fell over. 

“Tav! What do we keep telling you? Cover your mouth when you sneeze or cough,” Kara said sternly. “You can really do some damage if you’re not careful.”

Tav looked up guiltily. The other children, scrambling up, all seemed to be more excited and surprised than hurt, which Tav immediately seized on. “Look, everybody’s okay, Ieiu.”

Kara glanced over apologetically at Gwen and Steve. “I almost forgot to talk to you about this. They’re pretty good about controlling their speed and strength, but they still have lapses. That’s why we didn’t enroll them till this year. Tav doesn’t leave the ground if you tell them not to, but Jul will take off if you don’t watch her, and then there you are, hanging onto her ankles while she’s trying to get to escape velocity.” She shifted Zan to her other hip and dug a small black rectangle that looked like a car key out of her pocket. “Here. This is a sort of pager that will reach me wherever I am, and I’ll get here right away.”

“Oh,” Gwen said, understanding dawning. “ _Oh._ You’re—they’re—” Suddenly it all made sense: the power sneeze, the gender mutability, the pair of unsmiling, incredibly fit-looking black-clad strangers who’d spent three hours yesterday crawling all over the classroom. She hadn’t even looked at the non-disclosure agreement when she’d signed it; she worked for the premier preschool in National City, after all, and they were used to the vagaries of teaching the children of actors and politicians.

“Supergirl, yeah,” Kara confirmed. “Sorry, you didn’t know? I thought Alex had had the talk with the principal.”

Steve waded into the conversation for the first time. “Uh, you know, the ‘Super’ in the school name is really just a rhetorical flourish. We’re not—” Then he waved his hands helplessly.

Kara laughed. “Oh, I know! We’re here for the inquiry-based curriculum and the student-teacher ratio, not because we think this is a special academy for junior crime fighters!” She winked. “We’ve got one of those. Don’t tell anybody.”

“Right,” Gwen said. She noticed, out of the corner of her eye, that the kids were getting a little feral. Graham had picked up the plastic spatula from the play stove and appeared to be beating Milo over the head with it. “I think we’d better get to the day, everybody! Morning circle time!” She added to Kara, who was taking the hint and slinging her bag over her shoulder, “I’m looking forward to a great year.” Then, indicating Zan, she trilled, “And another a few years after that!”

“Oh, that’s just the start. Ast is eighteen months, they’re with Alex today. Par’s at home with the sitter—they’re eight months old—and Maggie is due again in the beginning of November,” Kara informed her. “You’re going to have the Kar-Els around for a long time.”

Gwen grinned. She couldn’t help it. Supergirl and her kids showed every sign of providing quality entertainment.

  
  


House Kar-El celebrated the first day of school the way they liked to celebrate most things, with a family picnic in the backyard. Their backyard—three conjoined backyards—would be the envy of everyone in National City, if anyone could see into it, which they couldn’t. (Alex and Maggie had been concerned, as a tactical matter, about the large, low warehouse that backed onto their block. Certainly someone could surveil them from the roof? And wouldn’t a property like that be snapped up and converted into condos any day now? Then Lena confessed that she’d bought the warehouse at the same time as she’d bought the third house, with an eye on security but also with the idea that someday it would make a marvelous indoor playground for youthful Kryptonians. Which, in fact, it had.)

Three of the House’s four adults sat at the weathered teak table on the eastern patio, close in to the kitchen of Alex and Maggie’s house, where they ate as a family when they had meals outside. The giant gas grill was cooling down after delivering a truly astonishing number of hot dogs and hamburgers to Kara and the children, who were now playing a complicated combination of dodge ball, football, and Red Rover, with constantly evolving rules.

Alex, Maggie, and Lena sipped wine (at least, Alex and Lena did; Maggie drank seltzer and kissed Alex for the taste of her lips) and watched the antics. It was an astonishing sight, or would have been if they hadn’t been used to it: Tav and Jul were barely visible as they ran in circles around Kara, who allowed them to knock her down and then bounced theatrically back up, twenty or thirty feet into the air. Zan chugged after them, determined to keep up though utterly unable to do so. Ast was still figuring out how their legs worked, so they spent most of their time airborne, which their siblings derided as cheating. Given that no one really knew what the object of the game was, that hardly mattered. There were two kinds of balls involved, a soccer ball and a few tennis balls, but no one could agree on what they were for or how they figured into the scoring, so mostly they were kicked and thrown around at random.

  


#### Alex

Alex leaned back in her chair and watched the mayhem with quiet pride and a pleasant wine-induced warmth. This, even in its outlandishness, was a greater normalcy than she could ever have imagined herself having. She was a parent and a wife. A homeowner. She had a 401(k). Her pressing daily concerns were to get the boiler serviced, pay the utility bills, cut the grass (she was looking forward to offloading that chore onto the kids).

She frankly hadn’t expected to live long enough to worry about retirement or amortization. But everything had, inexplicably, settled down. J’onn was working in the West Wing as the president’s special adviser on alien affairs, so the “deputy” had been redacted permanently from Alex’s title, trapping her behind a desk more often than not. The most dangerous and unsettled period of hostile alien activity was long past, and she hardly ever got shot at anymore. It was gradually sinking in that this was actually her lot: home and family and a regular paycheck.

Even Maggie, who swore up and down that she’d be chasing crime through the streets till she was old and gray, had taken an indeterminate hiatus from active duty at NCPD, though that was only because she’d accidentally conceived her third child while she was still on maternity leave with her second (“My mother swore you don’t get pregnant while you’re breastfeeding!” “How many kids did your mom have?” “... Seven.” “And you elected to take her word on how _not_ to get pregnant?”).

Alex wondered sometimes if she wasn’t the only one of them who got exactly what she wanted. She was pretty sure that Maggie had been ready to have a perfectly ordinary married life, the urban queer equivalent of the white picket fence in the suburbs. Maggie’d been kicking around— _kicked_ around—at the periphery of polite society since she was a teenager, and Alex could taste how much she’d craved to be able to relax at last. Instead she was forging an experimental and largely hidden family life that tested every reservoir of patience, ingenuity, and understanding.

Kara wouldn’t have been able to get what she wanted no matter what Alex did, and wouldn’t for many human generations. By then, of course, she’d no longer have Alex, which was something Alex tried not to dwell on. She tried to think instead about the future that she’d helped Kara create, the one in which the progeny of the House of El would fight for justice throughout the world.

Lena—well, who knew what Lena wanted. Maybe Kara did, but Alex wouldn’t lay money on it.

But Alex got Kara, and Maggie; she got the incredible experience of birthing Jul and Ast, as well as being a parent at whatever muddy remove to Tav, Zan, and Par. Maggie would give them another baby in November, and after that it would be Alex’s turn again. The life that she had once resigned herself to, solitary and duty-bound and half-drunk, seemed like a distant dream.

  


#### Maggie

Maggie loved this kind of moment in their lives, but it also made her unexpectedly melancholy. The unquenchable if unrealistic romantic in her had wanted Alex to be the One, had wanted to be Alex’s One.

This life they had, with Kara, offered them all enormous opportunities—of love, of pleasure, of adventure, of support and comfort and companionship—and it was also an acknowledgment that she and Alex could never have satisfied each other’s every need.

An honest and necessary acknowledgment, to be sure, one that every couple in the world ought to make but almost never did. It was still hard to admit.

They’d never been afraid of facing truths or doing the hard work, which was a blessing when they complicated their relationship by including Kara. The day-to-day, moment-to-moment reality of their lives might be pleasantly domestic, but the smoothness was a function of intense work, negotiation, and thoughtfulness.

And then, Lena. Kara’s breezy assurance that Lena was not interested in being a part of the family had proved to be only partly true. A part of their sexual relationship, no; a part of their joint household, not exactly. Still, she was part of their lives, nearly as big a part as Zan was—and Zan was Tav and Jul’s much-loved, everpresent, annoying little brother. What exactly is the name for the person who is the mother of your child’s sibling?

Maggie liked Lena more than she could have imagined she would. Lena occupied a sort of sister-in-law space in Maggie’s heart, the only place she could have fit; they would not have been comfortable together, much less friends, under almost any other conditions, but having been allied with her by circumstance, she enjoyed Lena’s sharp mind and dry humor, was grateful for her unhesitating generosity, respected her commitment to her employees and her goals.

Lena’s generosity had been, at first, a point of discomfort, even contention. When she refused to allow them to pay her back for the renovation work she’d had done, Maggie had been furious. Finally, after several days of icy silence on Maggie’s part, Lena had cornered her. “Look, Maggie,” she’d said. “If I didn’t have a place to live, and I needed five hundred dollars to get an apartment, would you give it to me?”

Maggie had shrugged, avoiding Lena’s eyes. “Of course.”

“In the context of my life, this is five hundred dollars,” Lena insisted. “And for you to repay me is ... embarrassing. Embarrassing to me, that is. I have more money than I’ll ever need, and it would feel exploitative for me to take yours.”

Maggie had been silent for a moment, and then burst out, “I can take care of myself. And my children. I’m not—” And she had had to clench her jaw against the sudden, unexpected onrush of tears. She looked at the ceiling for a long beat, and said, keeping her voice monotone, “When I was growing up everyone around me, and I mean everyone, assumed that my family was a charity case because of the color of our skin. I can’t tell you how much patronizing ‘help’ we got. My dad was once standing on a corner in Lincoln waiting for the light and somebody dropped a handful of change in his coffee.” She’d laughed humorlessly. “He owned a grocery store. My mother was a teacher. We were better off than ninety percent of our neighbors. But they still assumed they had to be superior to us, and _helping us out_ proved it.”

Lena had nodded slowly, processing this as best she could. “I can’t fully imagine or understand what that was like,” she’d said finally. “But I can understand being hurt by other people’s assumptions, and I’m certainly familiar with the way people use money to express contempt.” She was silent for another moment, and then said, “Let’s do this. Instead of giving me the money, give to something, build something that’s important to all of us—something I might not have thought to do on my own. That would be a tremendous gift.”

Which was how the safe space for teens, human and nonhuman alike, at the Queer-Plus Center in downtown National City became the Luthor Room. During the dedication ceremony, Lena leaned over and whispered to Maggie, “I’m going to have to get hold of the closed-circuit footage from my mother’s cell at the moment she finds out about this.”

She never actually bothered to do that, but the photo of her laughing with Maggie that ran in the National City papers the next day probably did shave years off Lillian Luthor’s life. Maggie considered that as much of an accomplishment as the space itself.

  


#### Lena

Lena had always inhabited a limited world. Her wealth, her ingrained sense of mission, the notoriety of her last name, the threats under which she lived all served to narrow the number of people she allowed in. This circle into which she’d settled was more nourishing than anything she’d ever hoped for, even though the people in it were so far outside her social comfort.

She was fortunate, Lena thought, to have chanced into the family that they had. Then she corrected herself: She had been fortunate, yes, but that was because she had assessed and chosen wisely. Kara was perfect for her—a person with secrets of her own, whose time was spoken for and whose ambitions went far beyond a single human lifetime. That she was also kind, and loving, and nurturing, and eye-wateringly attractive, and an incredible lover, those were just perks, Lena told herself.

Zan’s conception had been as spontaneous a decision as Lena had ever made, despite the fact that she’d thought about it for months beforehand. She hadn’t discussed it ahead of time with Kara, though she well knew that Kara would greet the prospect of another child with eager enthusiasm. And it had in fact required nothing more than a touch and a whisper: “I want you bare tonight, Kara. Give me a baby.”

The way Lena lived now, outré though it might appear to an outside observer, was one of a handful of possible ways for her to be a mother and have a partner and make her life work, and just about the only one that didn’t entail her giving up daily control of L-Corp. She knew it, and yet ... Lena couldn’t pretend that she didn’t sometimes yearn for the insular happy ending she’d always vaguely assumed was the winning endgame. A partner, singular, who came home to her, singular (or, more likely given her responsibilities and ambitions, who she came home to) at the end of each day, and a couple of children to round out their family unit.

She knew that the desire was more than a little ridiculous, and it only existed in her mind because it had been programmed by television and Disney movies. She ran a multibillion-dollar corporation. If she had two nights to herself in a week, she was lucky; anyone who depended on her for daily companionship would be a sad and lonely person. Likewise, her son—who was the center of her everything, and whom she did make time for every day even when she didn’t have it—would have had an isolated, lusterless childhood (not unlike her own) if it weren’t for the constant presence of his siblings and their mothers.

To be a part of this family and also apart from it was lonely, but comfortable in a way that she suspected that trying to be a fully integrated member of the sprawling household would not be. She wasn’t made to be part of a warm, interconnected, intergenerational collective—or, if she’d been made that way, she’d been trained out of it.

They talked, now and then, about adding a door from Kara’s to Lena’s house. The project somehow never made it onto the critical list, and so Lena and Zan lived ever so slightly separately from the rest of them. It never stopped Zan from banging out of his own back door and into his next-door siblings’, and Lena hoped that it wouldn’t ever make him feel as if he were less of a Kar-El than the others. When and if he started to evidence any such alienation, Lena would start swinging the sledgehammer herself, but until then—until then she was happy with the way it was.

Considering that Lena had made a calculated decision early on in her career to employ her sexual attractiveness as a corporate management tool like any other, it was ironic (or perhaps inevitable?) that she didn’t have a surfeit of personal sexual energy. She enjoyed sex, she had a creative sexual imagination, and she rarely had any trouble accommodating the share of Kara’s boundless enthusiasm that was directed her way, but if she had been Kara’s sole outlet, she knew full well that they would both have suffered.

She’d never hungered for sexual exclusivity with Kara—never even considered it, really. Lena knew what sex meant to Kara. She knew how important Kara’s sexual connection to Alex and to Maggie was, and she knew that she herself would never be denied the pleasure of Kara’s body if she needed it. She would also never be solely responsible for Kara’s satisfaction, which was a peculiar relief.

Kara lived most fully in kinetic contact with the naked skin of the ones she loved. It recharged her nearly as much as the touch of the yellow sun. Despite this Lena had never felt a moment of sexual jealousy in all the time she’d been involved with Kara. That could have been because she felt no stirring toward either Alex or Maggie. In any case, she was grateful that she didn’t, because it made this life possible. It meant that she could have a cordial, respectful, and drama-free relationship with the other women who shared her lover’s bed.

Sometimes it almost seemed as though she and Alex were friends. They respected each other, without doubt; they’d collaborated on a number of projects that had been deeply satisfying to them both. They were alike in certain ways—the single-mindedness they could each turn on when they needed it, their stormy emotional intensity, their hidden tenderness. Only Lena was fully aware of these similarities, however, because she took enormous pains to conceal such characteristics in herself.

Kara was her best friend, of course. Kara was the crackling fireplace that Lena held her frozen hands up to, the source of light and heat and warmth that Lena had longed for all her life but assumed that she would never attract. Kara was laughter and love and safety, the one who held her tight together when she felt like she might fly apart, the only one who could make her stop and _experience_ instead of analyze.

In the end, though, the person in this menagerie who Lena found herself feeling the greatest kinship with was neither her intellectual partner nor her romantic partner, but Maggie Sawyer, who was not her partner at all. There was no real basis for this. The two of them had grown up in worlds that could hardly have been further apart; they had few professional intersections that didn’t involve Lena’s being shot at and almost no common interests.

And yet, Maggie belonged to the real world alongside her in a way that the Danvers sisters really didn’t. Things like money and social class had meaning to Maggie, even if she was resisting those meanings with all her strength. Public recognition for one’s accomplishments—caring about it felt crass and dirty when she tried to discuss it with Kara or Alex, but Maggie understood immediately. She too felt the approbation of her peers as an affirmation of her connection to them, not merely as a boost to her own ego.

Maggie, in a word, was human. And human was sometimes hard to come by, in this house.

  


#### Kara

Kara collapsed in feigned exhaustion on the edge of the lawn and let Jul and Tav tackle her. With one in either arm, she rolled back and forth, pulling them in for kisses in turn while they shrieked in ecstasy and counterfeit outrage; then Zan and Ast piled unsteadily on.

Par was in Alex’s lap, pounding on the table with a spoon. Kara could hear the steady, swift heartbeat of the baby curled tight within Maggie. Six Kar-El children, counting the not-quite-here-yet one in Maggie’s womb, and Alex was already impatient to carry the next. It was amazing, impossible to predict, and yet inevitable, the way these tiny people were filling the yawing emptiness that she’d carried in her heart since she was thirteen years old. She reveled in the squirming weight of four kids on top of her and let herself laugh with the fullness of the love that swelled inside her.

In Tav and Jul, Kara was beginning to be able to see the adults they would grow to be in only a few short years: tall, strong, beautiful. She was doing her best to make sure that they would also be humble and noble and kind.  


Then Alex announced, “Brownies,” and the children scrambled off Kara and over to the table, their shrieking changing only in tone, not volume.

Kara lay on the grass, watching the kids devour their dessert, watching Maggie absently stroke her belly. She was insisting that this would be her last pregnancy; Lena was equally certain that one was as much as she wanted. Alex seemed to love having babies, which had been wildly unpredictable even to Alex. When Maggie had realized that she was unexpectedly pregnant again, Alex had sulked, not because the plan of their life was being upset but because she had been eager to get pregnant again herself.

And yet if Kara never had any more children, this grace that she’d been given here, through these three women, would be more than enough. She had six amazing persons, and perhaps more to come, who would move forward with her through the centuries. Six persons who would help to lessen the blows she would inevitably take as the humans she loved succumbed, eventually, to the fate of all mortals.

But she was not going to think about that. She was going to love these beautiful creatures as much as she could, for as long as she could. It was not in her nature to do anything else.

Alex caught her eye then. “Kara,” she chided. “I can’t believe you’re lying over there in the grass when I’ve said the word ‘brownies.’ Are you sure that’s really you?” She smiled, and Kara was flooded with the feeling of belonging, of being tethered to the life of this world, that she never got in precisely that way from any other.

She jumped to her feet. “Don’t worry,” she answered. “I’m with you.”

## POSTSCRIPT

Every twenty-five or thirty years, Kara Danvers—or Dani Karl, or Zara Carlisle, or whatever she happens to be calling herself this time around—dies. That is to say, she wraps up the business of her alternate identity, stages a death or disappearance, and reemerges in another city under another name.

She uses the time she takes with this transition to make a visit to a row of weatherbeaten brick townhouses in National City. From the street they look half in ruins, but they are significantly different on the inside, since they comprise the longtime shared residence of her oldest children, Tav-El and Julena Kar-El.

Kara is close to all her children, but she is especially deeply connected to the first generation of her Earthborn brood, the nine Kar-El siblings who grew up in this place. They live all over the world now, but they will join her at this time to renew their bonds with her and with each other. 

A chief object of Kara’s pilgrimage is the backyard. It is no longer the playground of a horde of excited children; it’s a solemn place now, quiet and serene. Kara goes out there almost at once, after a brief, fierce embrace with Tav and Jul, and takes a long solitary hiatus from the blur of determined activity she inhabits daily. 

She stands in front of the three waist-high marble monuments in contemplation and remembrance. Her memories of the women who lie here remain clear and fresh. She does not indulge in them often, but she lets them take her over at these times. 

She remembers the sounds torn from Alex’s throat as she labored to birth each of their five children, those cries remarkably similar to the sounds that she’d made as Kara thrust into her to conceive them.

She remembers, in fact, the conception of every one of the children she had with these three women. The sex that intentionally created those lives had been a holy act. Even when Lena had asked her for a baby so abruptly; even the “accidental” conception of Mat, Maggie’s last. (Kara had been vocally skeptical of Maggie’s contention that she wasn’t fertile, and she’d treated their lovemaking with the reverence of every other time she’d put life into one of her lovers, and she’d been right.)

She remembers the one and only time she took them all to bed. It had been her birthday and she had told them drunkenly about her fantasy of fucking all three of them; she’d never been more grateful for the speed of her metabolism than she was half an hour after that, already blessedly sober and fully able to experience being buried in the three women she loved.

She remembers the joy with which Lena would greet an experiment that finally went right. She remembers the fierceness with which Alex insisted on walking ahead of her into a danger zone, protecting her—her, Kara, the nearly invulnerable one. She remembers Maggie’s amazing ability to be tender moments after she’d either fought off or talked down a crew of armed hostiles.

She remembers Maggie nursing the babies, Alex sweaty and disheveled after mowing the lawn, Lena trying to conceal her nervous excitement as she opened the door of the warehouse to show them the sensory gym she’d built for all the kids.

She remembers the lift of Lena’s eyebrow, the way Maggie’s eyes creased when she laughed, the wholeheartedness with which Alex ... did everything.

She remembers.

Remembering these things brings other memories, less welcome but just as insistent, for with the brightness of their lives comes the eternal darkness of their deaths.

Maggie had died in a firefight when Mat was only eight. It had torn them all apart. Kara had seen plenty of death even at that point, and has seen much more since, but the image of Maggie’s lifeless body burns in her mind: a copy of the woman she loved lying broken on the ground, nearly perfect but utterly empty. For some reason the fact that Maggie’s hair still moved in the breeze when all of her own movement was gone forever was the thing that had destroyed Kara.

Lena had succumbed to a vicious brain cancer just a few years later. She had never been as careful in her workshop as she should have been when she was pursuing a breakthrough. In her search for a power source to end the need for fossil fuels, she had been exposed to the radiation of a variety of alien suns, and one of them had killed her. Lena had fought with spirit, determined to stay alive for Zan as long as she could, enduring two major surgeries and course after course of chemotherapy. Even at the end, when she was gaunt and bald and the lines etched around her eyes were carved by pain instead of laughter, she had remained elegantly beautiful.

Alex, who of all of them was the one who’d expected a short life and a brutal death, slipped gently away in her own bed, in Kara’s arms, a few days shy of her hundred and second birthday.

Kara takes a moment to let herself feel it fully. It hurts, of course. She misses them so terribly that sometimes it seems as if she has been hollowed out from the inside, scooped out like a Halloween pumpkin. But the memory of what she was so lucky to have had also gives her strength and calm and resilience. When she reenters the house, her eyes will be wet but she’ll be smiling.

As she leaves, she places a small stone atop each marker to commemorate her visit. The monuments are dotted with these mementoes, and more are scattered on the ground around them, pushed off by wind and squirrels and the movement of the earth.

  
  


That night the house is full. Kara’s first nine are all there, some with their own children and grandchildren, and the volume is high. The house is still big enough to contain everyone who comes, but just barely. Some year soon they will have to start spilling out into the back, and the somber sanctuary will light up once more with laughter and talk and play. Kara is almost ready for that to happen. A generation or two from now, perhaps.

Kara deliberately doesn’t sit at the head of the table. Her children would defer to her still, but she wants it to be clear that they control themselves. They call her Ieiu; their spouses and partners call her Kara. A name none of them use, that Kara does not use, is Supergirl. That persona died with the three who rest in the backyard and their generation. The blue suit is long retired. Kara adopts instead a tough, sensible uniform, all black, with a functional toolbelt, and a thigh holster for her comm device, and heavy boots. Only nine others now living understand the homage she is paying.

To the wider world she’s known now, when she is known at all, simply as Kar-El. She looms more and less large in the business of this planet as circumstances demand, which has included a mercifully brief period of postwar famine and anarchy in which she was, of necessity, the de facto ruler of all of human civilization. She’d hated it.

The world is still a cruel place; it is also still beautiful and vibrant and alive. That is in part due to the efforts of the mighty, humble, kind people in this busy room. It is in part due to the contributions of the silent three in the back. It is mostly, as always, due to the thousands of choices made by each of the billions of people who truly rule this Earth. 

Dinner is loud and long, with each of her children and grandchildren petitioning her to come live near them this time. She smiles and jokes, but keeps her own counsel. She had made a decision about her next move long before she ended her previous tenure, as she almost always does. She was tempted to live off-planet for a while, now that the lunar station is operating at full capacity and encouraging civilian emigration, but she has ultimately chosen to spend her next lifetime in what was once the American South. Devastated by climate change and twisted by decades of resentment toward (and condescension from) the affluent Northeast, Louisiana and Mississippi had been the first states to secede from the postwar U.S., followed quickly by Texas and (for completely different reasons) California. The Gulf Territories, as they’re now known, are a disaster, and Kara gravitates toward disaster. She owes her adopted world that much. 

  
  


When she leaves these houses to establish a new ordinary self among the people she has chosen to live for, she walks out through the foyer of the center structure past a framed photograph, a large print at least three feet on a side. The edges are yellowing but the photo is of archival quality and the image is still crisp. There’s no legend, no signature, but anyone with a little knowledge of the history of photography would peg it as a James Olsen. It shows Kara Zor-El sitting on the floor in a loose white tank top and tight black shorts, her arms stretched out to either side with a tiny infant on each one, its sleeping face cradled in her upturned palm. The expression on her face is joy so bright it could light the world.

And it does.


End file.
